Summary notes of the LCU meeting on 31/05/2011

Present: JA, CA, HB, LD, SF, MG, BH, HH, JJ, YL, JL, FS, RT, FZ

Report from meetings

• SLM and general information -> MG
  Office renovation has started in buildings 9 and 6 with the toilets, then offices starting downstairs. This may cause some inconvenience. Our retired collaborators move to building 561.
  There are plans to renew the collaboration with China: potential candidates has been considered. The work programme could be focused on LHC optics, MDs and injectors' upgrade activities.
  There has been a USLARP collaboration meeting. The presentations are on indico.
  Etienne Forest and Sasha Molodozenthsev are visitors in ABP for a month working on PTC/ORBIT code for apace charge studies in the LHC injectors and to introduce an option to have time-dependent field in PTC.
• LHC -> BH
  The LHC is running well with over 1000 bunches per beam, luminosities of up to 1.2e33cm-2s-1 and 25h luminosity lifetime. The overall running efficient as suffering from various interlocks and faults some of which have increased with intensity. For further information see the latest news. SF comments that the luminosity lifetime seems shorter if only burn-off is considered, which might indicate presence of emittance growth.
• LMC -> FZ
  The details of the past LMC meetings can be found on LMC page. 

Quark matter conference  ->  JJ  (slides)
John reported about highlights from the 2011 Quark Matter conference. The conference had over 700 participants and lots of interesting results from the first heavy ion run last year in the LHC and the lower energy proton run earlier this year. A remarkable agreement between estimated cross-sections and those measured at LHC was shown For this year, the experiments expect a 5 fold increase in luminosities in lead-lead collisions and for next year proton-ion collisions. Once more pA collisions seems to be an essential part of the ion physics programme.

MAD-X status overview -> LD  (slides)
Laurent gave a first report about on his plans as the new custodian for MAD-X. By standard computer science criteria, the MAD-X code appears as too complex with some lack in clarity and structure. The collaboration between C and FORTRAN code is fragile, in particular in the input / output.
Two different strategies are possible: a moderate one, where appropriate user support (e.g., for bug fixing and improvements) is provided in parallel to a refactoring of the code for a longer-term improved efficiency. A more aggressive one where the code is deeply re-written (e.g., the parse).
He advocates major internal changes to reduce the size and complexity and time needed for MAD-X maintenance and support.
He also plans to improve the communication using appropriate mailing lists for users and developers.
His presentation triggered longer discussions on the pros and cons of different approaches. Laurent asked for further comments and suggestions that will be incorporated in a final proposal for future activities. 

AOB

None

Last update: 01-June-2011

MG & HB

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