Spending money in the budget. We have leftover money (because we haven't spent money on travel, for one thing) and should spend it before around April. Ideas:
Replace our computer cluster. The machines cdms1,2,3 and cdms-04-1,2,3,4 are considered outdated by IT and they are going to stop managing, turning all of those maintenance tasks over to us. Alternatively we could buy a new cluster that IT would manage.
Chad: “[old quote] - One node would be around $12,000. Highlights: Two 16-core processors with 32 threads each for a total of 32 cores and 64 threads; 128GB of Ram; 6 8TB hard drives for local storage/scratch (you may not need this many drives); 10G fiber networking; 5yr warranty”. Chad said this one machine would be more powerful than our current cluster.
New thermometry bridge to monitor multiple thermometers simultaneously.
Buy a new calibrated thermometer. Something seems wrong with Tower thermometer, and new Goldman thermometer is a little inconvenient to mount.
Tower-less detector mounting setup. We can probably achieve colder SQUETs and therefore better noise if we mount the detector without a Soudan tower. (For phonon-only devices - for charge readout we'd still need the tower.) Mostly need to design this, and can get ideas from e.g. TAMU. Need to buy superconducting wire and some sort of connectors, build plates and things (could have shop do the fabricating).
Laser and fiber-optic feedthrough for operating HVeV detectors. Could this also be used for low-energy calibration of 100mm Si detectors? Mostly need to figure out how to do this, but also will need to buy some things.
Service our spare circulation pump maybe.
Radioactive source for photoneutron calibration. Shortish half-life so you want to wait to buy the source until you need it.