Newsgroups: sci.physics.plasma
From WOLFE@CMOD2.PFC.MIT.EDU Wed Jul 5 11:49:11 1995
From: WOLFE@CMOD2.PFC.MIT.EDU
Organization: MIT
Subject: Alcator C-MOD Weekly Highlights

Alcator C-MOD Weekly Highlights
July 5, 1995

The scheduled maintenance period at Alcator C-MOD is continuing. Inspection
and preparations for new installations were the dominant activities this
week.

The head for the new Edge Thomson Scattering system is in-house and being
fitted up to mounting hardware produced at MIT. Feedthroughs and associated
hardware for fiber runs are in process.

Roger Richards and Don Hutchinson from ORNL were at M.I.T. last week
continuing preparations for the new ion-scattering diagnostic.

The PF coil cooling system was inspected. A minor plumbing error which had
increased the cooling time on the EF3U coil during the last campaign was
identified and repaired. Inspections of sump and LN2 pump filters have been
completed; both are clean.

The tension on the upper drawbars was checked and found to be within
specifications. The torque on the outer TF coax was also checked and found
to be in spec.

A new AlphaServer has been placed in service. During the summer the new
server will be used to provide more online space for C-Mod shot data
(approximately 7 gigabytes). When C-Mod resumes operation in the fall,
the AlphaServer will be our main data acquisition engine. A SCSI serial
highway will be attached directly to the AlphaServer. The system has a
hardware RAID controller which will provide slightly faster disk I/O than
the previous configuration where RAID was performed in software by each
system accessing the disks. (RAID, Redundant Array of Independent Disks,
provides faster throughput by optimizing disk I/O across multiple spindles.)With the addition of the new AlphaServer, the software RAID'ing of our disk
farm was discontinued. This reconfiguration has greatly improved the access to C-Mod data that resides on optical disk. The average time to retrieve an older C-Mod shot from optical jukebox has dropped from one or two minutes
to approximately 15 seconds.

Garry McCracken, Yuichi Takase, and Bruce Lipschultz are presenting papers
on C-MOD results at the European Physical Society meeting in Bournemouth,
UK. Ian Hutchinson, Miklos Porkolab, and Paul Bonoli are also attending theEPS meeting.