IceCube

So as of Tuesday I’m half-time on the Ice Cube experiment. The first couple of weeks I’m devoting to getting up to speed on Ice Cube; and later weeks will be sorted out by project.

There wasn’t room in the Physics Department, so they rented a suite downtown; which puts me only a block from the protests (which seem to be a boon for the local restaurants). The undergrads are mostly gone from their IceCube offices right now, and many people are taking vacations after a strenuous (and successful, and enough under budget to leave some of the contingency available for other necessities) summer of installations at the South Pole. The floor is pretty quiet, except for the tape label printer (sounds like a coffee grinder) and the video conference room. And the Help Desk, which is the other side of the cabinet from me.

I’m trying hard to understand the workings of the FileTek storage system and work out a model for how to best store the data: 90GB/day coming in from the Pole. The original plan was simple, but not very convenient for long term data access, since it blended raw data and processed data in the same storage medium—which means you can’t easily archive the raw data to shelving to make room for new tapes. I think I’ve already solved one of the outstanding problems.

The StorHouse software was evidently written by VMS veterans (ask me how I can tell!), but it looks like their main platforms were Windows and MVS, with a smattering of SunOS and AIX. Linux seems rather an afterthought, and the documentation doesn’t always closely match the installed system.

Very high energy neutrinos can pass through the Earth and interact to produce upward-moving muons. In the very clear ice of Antarctica you can detect the shock-wave (Cerenkov) light with phototubes. Processing the results and making sure you understand the calibration and backgrounds is what takes the manpower and the computing power. They have to design a system that works robustly with as little attention as possible—there’s no way to bring spare parts down during the winter. Challenging engineering, challenging maintenance, challenging data management, and challenging analysis—sounds like a dream.

There are no penguins within hundreds of miles of the South Pole, but they’re all over the suite—in form if not in person. I’m using a MacBook, which is pretty confusing: window management icons on the other side, cut/paste using the wrong mouse buttons, ubiquitous apple-key shortcuts and such like things. But I manage. I learned those goofy Windows operating systems, I’ll learn this one.

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Winter and summer have different meanings around here...