Run8 analysis planning

[Tom Banks <tbanks@socrates.berkeley.edu>]

> As we accepted long time ago, the job of working out the ePC deadtime,
> afterpulse model is in the Illinois court and I admit, we have not
> finalized that. We will use the information you present from the Berkeley
> analysis to model if that can play a role and to propose safe cuts.
> Sorry for the delay, it is on my and Steve's worklist.
>
> Of course, the above is a statement of principles. If the required
> UCB analysis cannot be done in reasonable time before the September
> meeting, we would have to cut a compromise.

Dear Peter et al.,

I am reluctant to perform any accounting of tasks assigned and met, given
that the time-intensive Berkeley muDetector study proved to not really be
of any practical value, and that Steve's excellent deuterium concentration
ratio study provided hard numbers.  At this juncture, I think we should
carefully focus upon how to optimally divide up any remaining tasks, where
possible.

Unfortunately, the unavoidable fact is that Berkeley is at a significant
comparative disadvantage at the moment regarding computing power.  A full
Ntuple production and analysis pass over the skimmed data on merlin takes
something on the order of 2.5 weeks; my understanding is that Steve can do
the same on the Illinois cluster in ~ 2 days (pending approval of your
application for more time).  I imagine it will be difficult to make any
improvements in the Berkeley analysis infrastructure in the next 3 months,
especially given Fred's involvement with Run10, so we are probably stuck
with our situation.  This means that Steve is in a better position to work
on mapping out ePC cluster/deadtime/etc. effects because of his quick
turnaround, but I also don't think it's fair to shove this last
showstopping task onto him because of that.  On the other hand, I don't
know what Berkeley can do on the matter aside from making a few more
passes testing various conditions which are just shots in the dark.

We should think about this over the coming week, and discuss options in
the next teleconference.  I know that things are getting critical for
Run10 calibration studies, but we're fast losing time for the Run8
analysis too.

Regards,
Tom