My visit to BNL

My visit to BNL in summer 1999.
Thanks to dr Pawlak and prof. Pluta from Institute of Physics of Warsaw university of Technology (where I am a student) I was able to go to Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is situated on Long Island, NY. The largest working heavy-ion collider RHIC is is being run there. One of the experiments, that sre going to be conducted with the help of this collider is STAR. The group from our University is a part of international STAR collaboration. I was invited to BNL by the BNL STAR Spokesmann Tim Hallmann.

My work
In BNL I was working in the Department of Physics in the STAR experiment group. My supervisor was Claude A. Pruneu, who is responsible for On-Line software for the detector. I also closely cooperated with other members of the group: Mei-Li Chen and Jeff Porter.

I did the following work for the On-Line group:

Migrating the On-Line servers from Orbix to ORBACUS
STAR On-Line servers communicate with each other and with the clients using CORBA - Common Object Request Broker Architecture. This mechanism is a layer above standard Unix sockets. It is object - oriented and, what is more important platform and progamming language independent. (It is true - I personally ran the connection between Java client run on Windows NT, and a server written in C++, run on SunOS and Linux). If You want to learn more about this standard, visit the OMG webpage.
When I came to BNL On-line software was running with the commercial implementation of CORBA - Orbix. However the technical support was not satisfactory and the license cost were high. It was decided, that we will try to rewrite the server code, so that they would use a different implementation - ORBACUS, which was open-source, and free for educational institutions. The technical support (in the form of a mailing list) was very quick and helpfull.
This code migration was assigned as my task. During five weeks of my work I was able to rewrite the server code, compile and run them on SunOS and connect to them with OnlRoot client. By the end of my visit I also made the connection between SunOS servers and a Java client. I showed that it is possible to work with the new CORBA implementation. The current version of core On-Line servers works with ORBACUS.
Creation of Configuration Database Browser and Editor
The STAR experiment is going to work for several years. During this period various parts of the detector will be switched on and off. Each of this parts has its own specifications, configurations and ways of calibrating. In order to centralize and manage this information the confiuration database was created. The graphical interface was required to use it. Writing of this interface was my second task.
In my work I was using a graphical Java application builder - JBuilder fom Inprise. My graphical interface was in fact a brawser and editor of data stored in On-Line database, which was MySQL run on a Linux machine. During a few weeks I created such an interface. I implemented all the neccessary functions, including browsing, modifying, inserting and storing data. My module was integrated into the Nexus client, which is responsible for communication with the On-Line Servers.
As the conclusion of my work I created a short description of the program, which is also a manual. I may add, that I was able to run the Nexus client both on Windows NT and Linux.
Help in creating a connection between Nexus client and On-Line servers.
That same CORBA mechanism, which I was using to connect On-Line servers to each other, I also used to connect the Nexus client to the On-Line servers. I helped in making this connection work.

As a conclusion of my work for On-Line group at BNL I gave a short presentation during STAR Software Week in October 1999. I presented my working Nexus module, and I described its capabilities.

During my stay at BNL I also did some work outside the On-Line group:

Participation in STAR Colaboration Meeting.
At the begining of July '99 I participated in STAR Collaboration Meeting organized by BNL.
Participation in STAR HBT PWG Meetings
In STAR experiment the physics problems are being worked on by Physics Working Groups. Since my diploma thesis is connected with HBT interferometry, I was glad to participate in bi-weekly STAR HBT PWG meetings. Thanks to these meetings I gained substantial knowledge concerning HBT and began my work on StHbtMaker software.