The GDE Executive Committee, Area System Leaders, and Chairmen of the Change Control and Design & Cost Boards met in the KEK Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan (19-20 January 2006). (See this weeks Director’s Corner) Technical and cost discussions included the configuration of the main linac unit, the overall machine layout, including site dependent differences, and the relationship between the Low Q (small charge per bunch, but many bunches) parameter set and the operating flexibility of the Damping Rings. The agenda and links to the presentations and discussions can be found online.

In his keynote address, Tor Raubenheimer listed the equally important primary goal of getting the effort on producing the Reference Design Report (RDR) started. Since the biggest issue in the RDR will be the cost estimate, it is needed to establish costing procedures, working relationships, and interfaces and boundaries between the Area System, Technical System, and Global System groups, and to define the level of detail needed for the cost estimate and for the text of the report itself. Tor outlined aggressive milestones for producing the RDR: having the accelerator design complete and the costing effort running at full speed by the Bangalore meeting in March, preliminary cost numbers available and initial drafts of written documents by the Vancouver meeting in July, final cost estimates and final drafts by the Valencia meeting in November, and release of the RDR by next January. This led to many intermediate milestones, week-by-week, through June.

Nobu Toge (Chairman of the Change Control Board) discussed the status of the Baseline Configuration Document, and the control procedures that will be used as details are added to the baseline concepts while evolving into the RDR.

There were many presentations and discussions of issues involving the Damping Rings, including ion stability and filling patterns, and the configurations of the Electron Source, Positron Source, the Rings to Main Linac, including the Bunch Compressors, the Main Linac, and the Beam Delivery System. More extensive discussion included reports of meetings held earlier that same week at Fermilab on RF systems and at CERN on cryomodules and the cryogenic systems. Hitoshi Hayano described the issues still outstanding for the Main Linac, including Klystron performance, modulators, RF power and distribution, capacity and spacing of the cryogenic plants, focusing quadrupole and corrector magnets, instrumentation, optimization of cavities and cryomodules, and the overall packing fraction.

Kaoru Yokoya gave a concise summary of the issues of each subsystem as they relate to the overall layout, what has been decided, and what still needs to be decided.

Finally, Peter Garbincius (Chairman of the Design & Cost Board) presented some of the tools and methods needed to produce the RDR text and cost estimate, including preliminary Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), WBS Dictionary, Basis of Estimate, listing of information to be required from the Area System Groups, and a preliminary draft outline of the RDR document.

--Peter Garbincius