Dear colleagues,

In preparation for the first meeting on Offline Commissioning, we send 
you some information which we hope is useful for getting started, and
ask you to respond to a questionnaire.  A first draft of system 
requirements for offline commissioning must be given to ATLAS computing
management by the end of January.

The meeting will be:

  Date:   Wednesday 26 January 2005
  Time:   14:00-16:00
  Agenda: http://agenda.cern.ch/age?a05264 
  Phone:  Can be made available on request.

Some background:
Commissioning means bringing the ATLAS systems (detectors, TDAQ, HLT) 
from "just installed" to "operational". It refers mainly to activities 
at Point 1 and in integration.
It is broken into 4 phases
1- subsystem standalone commissioning
     DCS: LV, HV, cooling, gas, safety, DB recording and retrieving
     DAQ: pedestal runs, electronic calibration, write and analyze data
2- integrate systems into full detector
3- cosmic rays
     recording data, analyze/understand, distribute to remote sites
4- single beam, first collisions
     same, with increasingly higher rates.
Phases will overlap since different systems may be in different phases.
Commissioning starts very soon with (March 2005 for the barrel 
calorimeter electronics).

The talk that Rob gave during the December SW workshop gives further 
background information 
(http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a036309#s0).

Offline commissioning needs to tackle the requirements on the ATLAS 
offline software during all 4 commissioning phases. Examples of areas 
where quantitative or qualitative requirements need to be gathered and 
fulfilled are data volumes,  computing capacity, data exports, 
monitoring features, release strategy. 

As a starting point for discussion, we have set up the following 
questionnaire. We propose that each system presents a short (5 min) 
answer to these questions during our first meeting.

Questionnaire:

  1) What are the steps and timescales for the commissioning
     of your system?  In particular, what types of event data 
     will be taken, at what rates, in what volumes?

  2) An important subset of (1):  when will you first write
     ByteStream files?

  3) What different event formats will you take during the 
     commissioning phase?  Eg, do you plan on writing extended
     detector information into the ByteStream that is not the
     standard foreseen for ATLAS running?  
     Are all data converters ready for commissioning?

  4) What is the status of data converters for LVL2 data decoding?
     Are all offline classes needed for storing LVL2 ROI information
     in place in offline code?  Are changes foreseen in this area?

  5) What is the status of seeded algorithms for offline use?

  6) What are your plans for the use of cosmic muons (also, later, 
     beam halo muons and beam gas events)?  Calibration, alignment, ...
     Are non-pointing, out-of-time cosmic muons useful for your system?
     What is the status of your reconstruction for non-pointing,
     out-of-time events?
     Have you looked at the existing pre-collision MC samples?
     Are additional sampled needed (higher collision-like event statistics?
     Different detector configurations for the commissioning phase? ...).

  7) Certainly there are additional issues to be discussed 
     (eg monitoring, release strategy) which we want to put on the 
     agenda for later meetings. Briefly state the most burning extra 
     issues for your system, and please also include any comments regarding
     requirements on the offline area for commissioning.

Best regards,
Rob McPherson
Hans von der Schmitt