> > > Just for completeness: Attached is the VME transfer speed I get with the SIS3100/SIS1100 interface using 
> > > 2eVME transfer. This curve can be explained exactly with an overhead of 125 us per DMA transfer and a 
> > > continuous link speed of 83 MB/sec.
>
> [with ...]  the PSI-built DRS4 board, where we implemented the 2eVME protocol in the Virtex II FPGA.

This is an interesting hardware benchmark. Do you also have benchmarks of the MIDAS system using the DRS4 (measurements
of end-to-end data rates, maximum event rate, maximum trigger rate, any tuning of the frontend program
and of the MIDAS experiment to achieve those rates, etc)?

K.O.

Hi folks:

we've been running midas-1.9.5 for a few years here at Regina.  We are now
working on a larger cosmic ray testing that requires a second ADC and second TDC
module in our Camac crate (we use the hytek1331 controller by the way).  We're
baffled as to how to set this up properly.  Specifically we have tried:

frontend.c

/* number of channels */
#define N_ADC  12 
(changed this from the old '8' to '12', and it seems to work for Lecroy 2249)

#define SLOT_ADC0   10
#define SLOT_TDC0   9
#define SLOT_ADC1   15
#define SLOT_TDC1   14

Is this the way to define the additional slots (by adding 0, 1 indices)?

Also, we were not able to get a new bank (ADC1) working, so we used a loop to
tag the second ADC values onto those of the first.

If someone has an example of how to handle multiple ADCs and TDCs and
suggestions as to where changes need to be made (header files, analyser, etc)
this would be great.

Thanks, Zisis...

P.S.  I am attaching the relevant files.

> > Just for completeness: Attached is the VME transfer speed I get with the SIS3100/SIS1100 interface using 
> > 2eVME transfer. This curve can be explained exactly with an overhead of 125 us per DMA transfer and a 
> > continuous link speed of 83 MB/sec.
> 
> What VME module is on the other end?
> 
> K.O.

The PSI-built DRS4 board, where we implemented the 2eVME protocol in the Virtex II FPGA. The same speed can be obtained with the commercial 
VME memory module CI-VME64 from Chrislin Industries (see http://www.controlled.com/vme/chinp1.html).

Stefan

> Just for completeness: Attached is the VME transfer speed I get with the SIS3100/SIS1100 interface using 
> 2eVME transfer. This curve can be explained exactly with an overhead of 125 us per DMA transfer and a 
> continuous link speed of 83 MB/sec.

What VME module is on the other end?

K.O.

> I agree. Somehow mhttpd cannot run mtransition. I am not super happy with this dependance on user $PATH settings and the inability to capture error messages 
> from attempts to start mtransition. I am now thinking in the direction of running mtransition code by forking. But remember that mlogger and the event builder also
> have to use mtransition to stop runs (otherwise they can dead-lock). So an mhttpd-only solution is not good enough...

The way to go is to make cm_transition multi-threaded. Like on thread for each client to be contacted. This way the transition can go in parallel when there are many frontend computers for example, which will speed up 
transitions significantly. In addition, cm_transition should execute a callback whenever a client succeeded or failed, so to give immediate feedback to the user. I think of something like implementing WebSockets in mhttpd for that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket).

I have this in mind since many years, but did not have time to implement it yet. Maybe on my next visit to TRIUMF?

Stefan

Just for completeness: Attached is the VME transfer speed I get with the SIS3100/SIS1100 interface using 
2eVME transfer. This curve can be explained exactly with an overhead of 125 us per DMA transfer and a 
continuous link speed of 83 MB/sec.

> I am recording here the results from a test VME system using two VF48 waveform digitizers

Note 1: data compression is about 89% (hence "data to disk" rate is much smaller than the "data from VME" rate)

Note 2: switch from VME MBLT64 block transfer to 2eVME block transfer:
- raises the VME data rate from 40 to 48 M/s
- event rate from 220/sec to 260/sec
- mlogger CPU use from 64% to about 80%

This is consistent with the measured VME block transfer rates for the VF48 module: MBLT64 is about 40 M/s, 2eVME is about 50 M/s (could be 
80 M/s if no clock cycles were lost to sync VME signals with the VF48 clocks), 2eSST is implemented but impossible - VF48 cannot drive the 
VME BERR and RETRY signals. Evil standards, grumble, grumble, grumble).

K.O.

I am recording here the results from a test VME system using two VF48 waveform digitizers and a 64-bit 
dual-core VME processor (V7865). VF48 data suppression is off, VF48 modules set to read 48 channels, 
1000 ADC samples each. mlogger data compression is enabled (gzip -1).

Event rate is about 200/sec
VME Data rate is about 40 Mbytes/sec
System is 100% busy (estimate)

System utilization of host computer (dual-core 2.2GHz, dual-channel DDR333 RAM):

(note high CPU use by mlogger for gzip compression of midas files)

top - 12:23:45 up 68 days, 20:28,  3 users,  load average: 1.39, 1.22, 1.04
Tasks: 193 total,   3 running, 190 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 32.1%us,  6.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 54.4%id,  2.7%wa,  0.1%hi,  4.5%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   3925556k total,  3797440k used,   128116k free,     1780k buffers
Swap: 32766900k total,        8k used, 32766892k free,  2970224k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                   
 5169 trinat    20   0  246m 108m  97m R 64.3  2.8  29:36.86 mlogger                                    
 5771 trinat    20   0  119m  98m  97m R 14.9  2.6 139:34.03 mserver                                    
 6083 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  2.0  0.0   0:35.85 flush-9:3                                  
 1097 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.9  0.0  86:06.38 md3_raid1        

System utilization of VME processor (dual-core 2.16 GHz, single-channel DDR2 RAM):

(note the more than 100% CPU use of multithreaded fevme)

top - 12:24:49 up 70 days, 19:14,  2 users,  load average: 1.19, 1.05, 1.01
Tasks: 103 total,   1 running, 101 sleeping,   1 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  6.3%us, 45.1%sy,  0.0%ni, 47.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.6%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1019436k total,   866672k used,   152764k free,     3576k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    20976k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                   
19740 trinat    20   0  177m 108m  984 S 104.5 10.9   1229:00 fevme_gef.exe                             
 1172 ganglia   20   0  416m  99m 1652 S  0.7 10.0   1101:59 gmond                                      
32353 olchansk  20   0 19240 1416 1096 R  0.2  0.1   0:00.05 top                                        
  146 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.1  0.0  42:52.98 kslowd001       

Attached are the CPU and network ganglia plots from lxdaq09 (VME) and ladd02 (host).

The regular bursts of "network out" on ladd02 is lazylogger writing mid.gz files to HADOOP HDFS.

K.O.

I tried using the lazylogger "Disk" method to write into a HADOOP HDFS clustered filesystem and found a 
number of problems. I ended up replacing the lazylogger lazy_copy() function that still uses former YBOS 
code with a new lazy_disk_copy() function that uses generic fread/fwrite. Also fixed the situation where 
lazylogger cannot cleanly stop from the mhttpd "programs/stop" button while it is busy writing (the fix 
works only for the "Disk" method).

(Note that one can also use the "Script" method for writing into HDFS)

Anyhow, the new lazylogger writes into HDFS just fine and I expect that it would also work for writing into 
DCACHE using PNFS (if ever we get the SL6 PNFS working with our DCACHE servers).

Writing into our test HDFS cluster runs at about 20 MiBytes/sec for 1GB files with replication set to 3.

svn rev 5295
K.O.

> 2) cm_disconect_experiment() calls free(_net_send_buffer) but does not set its 
> value to NULL.

Set pointer to NULL after free() in these files:

M       odb.c
M       sequencer.cxx
M       mlogger.cxx
M       mhttpd.cxx
M       midas.c

svn rev 5294
K.O.

> In midas.c, the bk_delete function removes a bank by decrementing the total
> event size and then copying the remaining banks into the location of the first
> using memcpy from string.h.

Replaced some memcpy() with memmove(), including bk_delete().

svn rev 5293
K.O.

> > > Revision: r5286 
> > > Platform: Debian Linux 6.0.5 AMD64, with packages from squeeze-backports 
> 
> I found the problem only appears when I run mhttpd in scripts, whether bash or python.
> And I'm quite sure that the MIDAS environments (e.g. PATH, MIDAS_EXPTAB, MIDASSYS, etc.)
> are set in such scripts. If I start mhttpd in an xterm with or without "-D", it works
> fine.

Right. I see Debian 6.0.5 just came out hot off the presses. Would be good to fix this problem.

As a work around, can you run mhttpd without "-D", but in the background, i.e. "mhttpd -p xxx >& mhttpd.log &"?

Also what are your $PATH settings?

> So, what's the difference between invoking mhttpd directly and through a script?

As Stefan mentioned, "-D" invokes some nasty unix magic to disconnect the process from the user login session. It is 
possible that this magic breaks in the latest Debian.

MIDAS "-D" does roughly the same thing as "nohup".

K.O.

> > I found the problem only appears when I run mhttpd in scripts, whether bash or python.
> > And I'm quite sure that the MIDAS environments (e.g. PATH, MIDAS_EXPTAB, MIDASSYS, etc.)
> > are set in such scripts. If I start mhttpd in an xterm with or without "-D", it works
> > fine. So, what's the difference between invoking mhttpd directly and through a script?
> 
> When you start it with "-D", then mhttpd become a daemon. According to linux rules, it has to "cd /", so it lives in the 
> root directory, in order not to block any NFS mount/unmount. If something with the path is not correct then, mhttpd 
> cannot find mtransition then. Once I fixed that problem my moving mtransition to /usr/bin.
> 

I agree. Somehow mhttpd cannot run mtransition. I am not super happy with this dependance on user $PATH settings and the inability to capture error messages 
from attempts to start mtransition. I am now thinking in the direction of running mtransition code by forking. But remember that mlogger and the event builder also
have to use mtransition to stop runs (otherwise they can dead-lock). So an mhttpd-only solution is not good enough...

K.O.

> I found the problem only appears when I run mhttpd in scripts, whether bash or python.
> And I'm quite sure that the MIDAS environments (e.g. PATH, MIDAS_EXPTAB, MIDASSYS, etc.)
> are set in such scripts. If I start mhttpd in an xterm with or without "-D", it works
> fine. So, what's the difference between invoking mhttpd directly and through a script?

When you start it with "-D", then mhttpd become a daemon. According to linux rules, it has to "cd /", so it lives in the 
root directory, in order not to block any NFS mount/unmount. If something with the path is not correct then, mhttpd 
cannot find mtransition then. Once I fixed that problem my moving mtransition to /usr/bin.

Stefan

> > Revision: r5286 
> > Platform: Debian Linux 6.0.5 AMD64, with packages from squeeze-backports 
> > Problem:
> > After building and installation, using the script 'start_daq.sh' to start
> > 'sampleexpt'. Everything seems fine. But I cannot start a run through web. Using
> > 'odbedit' and 'mtransition' to start/stop a run works fine. So, what may cause
> > such a problem?
> 
> Well, it's mhttpd who cannot start the run, not you. So what happens when you press
> the "start run" button? Any errors in midas.log or in midas messages? Is mtransition
> in your PATH?
> 
> K.O.

I found the problem only appears when I run mhttpd in scripts, whether bash or python.
And I'm quite sure that the MIDAS environments (e.g. PATH, MIDAS_EXPTAB, MIDASSYS, etc.)
are set in such scripts. If I start mhttpd in an xterm with or without "-D", it works
fine. So, what's the difference between invoking mhttpd directly and through a script?

> Well, it's mhttpd who cannot start the run, not you. So what happens when you press
> the "start run" button? Any errors in midas.log or in midas messages? Is mtransition
> in your PATH?
After pressing "start run", there is a message displayed: "Run start requested". There
is no error in midas.log. And mtransition is actually in my PATH. I even looked into
"mhttpd.cxx" and found where "cm_transition" is called for starting a run. I have no
clue to grasp the reason.

The HTTPS SSL certificate on ladd00.triumf.ca has been updated. Same as the old
certificate, the new one is self-signed and your web browser may complain about
that and ask you to "save a security exception".

When you save the new certificate, you can verify that you are connected to the
real ladd00.triumf.ca by comparing the "SHA1 fingerprint" reported by your web
browser to the one given below (as reported by "svn update"):

Certificate information:
 - Hostname: ladd00.triumf.ca
 - Valid: from Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:31:51 GMT until Thu, 13 Jun 2013 22:31:51 GMT
 - Issuer: DAQ, TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC, CA
 - Fingerprint: 82:95:78:cb:78:d3:93:1d:d4:c8:e8:1a:64:0f:62:04:2d:0e:c3:4a

K.O.

> Revision: r5286 
> Platform: Debian Linux 6.0.5 AMD64, with packages from squeeze-backports 
> Problem:
> After building and installation, using the script 'start_daq.sh' to start
> 'sampleexpt'. Everything seems fine. But I cannot start a run through web. Using
> 'odbedit' and 'mtransition' to start/stop a run works fine. So, what may cause
> such a problem?

Well, it's mhttpd who cannot start the run, not you. So what happens when you press
the "start run" button? Any errors in midas.log or in midas messages? Is mtransition
in your PATH?

K.O.

Revision: r5286 
Platform: Debian Linux 6.0.5 AMD64, with packages from squeeze-backports 
Problem:
After building and installation, using the script 'start_daq.sh' to start
'sampleexpt'. Everything seems fine. But I cannot start a run through web. Using
'odbedit' and 'mtransition' to start/stop a run works fine. So, what may cause
such a problem?

> > > In midas.c, ...
> > >
> > > 1) _net_send_buffer is not set to NULL when declared.
> 
> Ah,okay. I was not aware of this feature of global variables.
> 

RTFM K&R "The C programming language". 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language

>  
> > > 2) cm_disconect_experiment() calls free(_net_send_buffer) but does not set 
> its value to NULL.
>

Confirmed. Sorry for confusion in my previous message. Set the pointer to NULL after free() is good practice.

But note that calling cm_connect and cm_disconnect multiple times is unusual use of MIDAS and you will most 
likely find more breakage.

K.O.