August 12, 2003

Michigan State University

Recorded by T. Hallman

Attending: J. Lauret (invited), R. Majka, M. Kaplan (Observer), J. Dunlop, H. Huang, G. Eppley, J. Thomas, T. Hallman, H. Wieman, B. Christie, T. Ljubicic

The following topics were discussed:

1. Beam Use Request:

   The discussion began with general considerations regarding the BUR: that it will be important coming up to the Long Range Plan that the heavy ion part of the program gets good grades concerning the effort to search for the QGP; that to realize the spin program that has been envisioned there needs to be steady yearly progress and a lot of integrated luminosity; that whatever BUR is developed we have to insure that it does not put us in the position of doing everything uniformly poorly.

   It was reiterated that a clear statement in the BUR submitted would be that a nominal running period of 27 weeks is not sufficient to carry out the heavy ion and spin physics programs without significantly delaying and/or damaging the spin program, the heavy ion program, or both.

   The scenarios planned to be discussed at the open session at the Collaboration meeting, (previously sent to the Collaboration in email) and their implications were discussed.

   The consensus was that a plan which came as close as possible to optimizing the use of the time given all of the goals and constraints was a plan with several performance based goals:

    

   1. start with full energy AuAu running with the goal of integrating 30 million central events useful for open charm, and > 50 million min bias for elliptic flow studies, running 50% live to accomodate rare triggers (high pt, upsilon, etc.) Other strangeness, HBT, UPC, e x e goals would be accomodated in this data set as well.

       

   2. work to achieve very high efficiency of data collection; if the above goals achieved quickly enough request 2 weeks at roots_NN = 63 GeV for high pt and soft physics comparison data.

       

   3. dedicate 5 weeks to spin physics machine development. If machine performance is good, request 3 additional weeks for spin physics data taking.

       

    

2. Decadal Plan

   There was a discussion of the existing draft Decadal Plan document. It was discussed that there needed to be a section included on computing. Also that Dick Majka was going to set a deadline for final comments of August 22.

    

3. Other Topics and Action Items

    

   1. T. Hallman indicated that he was going to oversee the writing of a 1-2 page executive summary for the Decadal Plan.

       

   2. J. Lauret indicated he would add a section to the Decadal Plan on the outlook for STAR computing in the future

       

   3. T. Hallman indicated that he was going to propose to the STAR Council that the STAR Software and Computing Leader be officially included as a member of the Advisory Board

       

   4. There was discussion concerning the need to be more comprehensive about identifying, listing, and tracking service work for students.

       

   5. There was discussion of comments made at the STAR critique meeting concerning staffing of shifts, training, etc. Two important conclusions (others are under conisderation and may be forthcoming) were that to be optimally efficient, there should be 2 detector operators on each shift in addition to the shift leader. (The precise makeup of the remainder of the shift staff TBD.) Also, that it was critical that people were conscientious about staying for the overlap day and insuring a robust transfer of knowledge and training to the oncoming shift.