From: Tschentscher, Thomas Sent: 16 January 2012 19:25 To: Decking, Winfried; Limberg, Torsten; Sinn, Harald Cc: Altarelli, Massimo; Burger, Claudia; Molodtsov, Serguei; Schwarz, Andreas; Tschentscher, Thomas Subject: Commissioning WG Attachments: 120116_StartofOperation.pptx Dear all, following the meeting of the commissioning WG on Friday I talked to Massimo about the crediting of milestones in terms of operation cost. I guess more discussion needs to be done on this issue, but below a first summary. 1. The Council has been rather strict to provide operation funds only for an operating facility. This means user operation. The current reading therefore should be that operation hours provided to user operation will be the calculation basis for access to operation funds. This being true for the photon beam systems and the accelerator. Given the current effort by Council to improve budget situation it seems not realistic to approach Council now to change this view. This means that with the goal of the facility to provide 4000 hrs and 6 instrument for user operation we need to assume that reaching the first milestone end of 2012 does not automatically free operation funds. It would be more likely the hrs of user operation enabled following this milestone. This will probably only a relatively small component (1000 hrs being probably already too high). 2. Reaching of a status where user operation is enabled at all instruments and reaching the goal of delivering 4000 hrs and 6 instrument for user operation is therefore an important goal in order to access the full operation funds. 3. However, this goal should not be compromised by incomplete/insufficient commissioning of the accelerator/electron delivery/photon beam transports/ scientific instruments. This is because the success of the facility will also be measured by its ability to perform experiments/science not possible at other facilities. As we know this will require to operate the facility at high performance (in many aspects) since the 'low hanging fruits' will all have been collected. I thought a little bit about this on the weekend and came to the conclusion that one way to get a clearer picture of this phase from 'First FEL experiment' to 'Full operation' might be to look at the operation time sharing. For further & needed discussion I attach a very first draft. In it I assume that Council may consider 'Early user operation' sufficient to allocate operation funds. Best wishes, thomas ________________________________________________________ Dr. Thomas Tschentscher European XFEL GmbH thomas.tschentscher@xfel.eu Phone +49 (0)40 8998-3904/-4434 Fax +49 (0)40 8998-1905 Visiting address: Albert-Einstein-Ring 19, 22761 Hamburg Mailing address: Notkestr. 85, D-22607 Hamburg www.xfel.eu