[Halld-offline] Minutes, GlueX Offline Meeting, June 1 '10

Wed Jun 2 09:15:36 EDT 2010

Find the meeting minutes at 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting%2C_June_1%2C_2010#Minutes 
and below as text.

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GlueX Offline Meeting, June 1, 2010
Minutes

JLab: Craig Bookwalter, Mark Ito (chair), David Lawrence, Simon Taylor,
Elliott Wolin, Beni Zihlmann

Announcements

1. Can we make binaries-in-path a requirement? Yes. See [30]Mark's
email message. This issue was raised by the desire to remove a
hard-wired path reference in the makefile for
sim-recon/src/libraries/HDDM.
2. Modifications to [31]coding conventions done. Mark added the policy
on warning-free code the policy on random stuff being restricted to
the "mcsmear" step in Monte-Carlo generation. The wiki page needs
to be cleaned up. No volunteers where found.
3. Automate links from CentOS5 to RHEL5-64-bit. Mark wrote [32]a
script to do this semi-automatically.
4. b[1]π analysis being run in a cron job. Mark has David's script
running weekly. It runs on all three platforms presently.
+ David mentioned that the next step would be to create
histograms. Right now a root tree is produced but the only
information available is that the reconstruction ran to
completion. He has a script that will produce histograms and
mail out the results. He and Mark will create an example that
runs on the cron job output.
5. [33]HOWTO do a kinematic fit for etapi0p events. We collectively
took a glance at Blake Leverington's recent HOWTO. See [34]his
email for a synopsis.
6. BMS document linked from software wiki page. David pointed Mark to
the appropriate [35]GlueX Doc and it is now linked from [36]the
Offline Software wiki page. There are parts of this that need
revision. No volunteers were found.
7. [37]HOWTO use a pre-built release. This HOWTO was [38]announced
last week on the email list. It describes our "standard procedure"
for using a release of sim-recon that someone else has built.
8. Release method for DAQ Group software is broken. Elliott told us
that there are aspects of the current release method that cannot
possibly work. This issue will be raised at the [39]online meeting
at some point.

Review of minutes from the last meeting

We reviewed [41]the minutes from the May 18 meeting.
* ROOTSpy. The student from CNU that was slotted to work on ROOTSpy
has reported for work, although Mark opined that this was an
announcement more appropriate for the Online Meeting.
* [42]Setting up the GlueX software environment. We reached a
consensus that Mark should decide on what to recommend to the
Collaboration as a best practice.
* [43]Progress toward constructing our own matrix classes. Since the
last meeting Simon has tried his new matrix classes in the Kalman
fitter. He sees very nice improvement in execution times.
* Hardware/Connection tracking database. Mark suggested that this
issue should probably be taken up at the Online Meetings.

News from IU

As reported by Matt Shepherd:
* Dan Bennett is making nice progress on the BCAL work. The first
goal is move the "MCResponse" to the mcsmear application and also
handle summing electronics channels that is presently in the
design. That effort is somewhat complicated since it breaks the
nice 1 to 1 or 1 to 2 (ends) mapping from GEANT to reconstruction.
We are handling this by renaming all objections in the data model:
sipmCell, sipmLayer, sipmSector, and fadcCell, fadcLayer,
fadcSector. This will undoubtedly take some refining, I'm sure
you'll be hearing updates from us in future meetings.
* On the amplitude analysis side of things, Matt Shepherd has a set
of amplitudes from Adam Szczepaniak to do mock analysis on pi_1 ->
rho pi channel. Matt hopes to have an example in place by the end
of the week.

GlueX Software Workshop

At the last meeting, the idea of a [46]GlueX Software workshop was
discussed. Since then the CLAS12 Workshop was held; there were about 45
participants on the first day, about 30 attended the tutorials on the
second day. Also David called a meeting of the committee that was
formed, and discussions of how the workshop might be organized has
started with other parties, notably Eugene Chudakov, Ed Brash, and Ole
Hansen. An expanded committee will meet this week. There are a lot of
ideas being discussed at present; the meeting should sort some of them
out.

Bug/issue tracking software

Elliott outlined our options:
* [48]Mantis
* [49]Drupal plug-in
* [50]Trac

Mantis has been installed on halldnew.jlab.org, but is not currently
visible off-site. We are waiting for Marty Wise of CNI to implement
LDAP authentication before they will allow access from outside the Lab.
Sherman White of CNI has installed a Drupal instance for us to test,
but no one has messed with it yet. This is also only available inside
the firewall.

Right now it looks like Mantis is the leading candidate. It has a lot
features, many more than we are actually looking for, but still has an
intuitive user interface. So that leaves room for growth, while not
defeating our purposes.

Effect of a more uniform field

David and Simon are doing studies aimed at developing requirements
should we decide to re-design the solenoid magnet.
* Simon is looking at using a smaller step size in the swimming,
although he thinks that the effect of material dictates a smaller
step size that dictated by the non-uniformity in magnetic field.
* David will look at the efficiency of track finding with a more
uniform field.

Mark reported that he spoke with Eugene after the last GlueX Meeting.
Mark thinks that Eugene wants to see whether a non-swimming approach to
track fitting is useful, at least in some contexts, if the field was
much more uniform. This would greatly increase reconstruction speed.

Action item review

We went over [53]the list. People were reminded of things that they
signed up to do.

New Action Items

1. Clean up coding conventions wiki page.
2. Find a volunteer to revise the BMS document.
3. Do studies of a more uniform magnetic field.
__________________________________________________________________

Recorded by [55]Mark Ito, 2 June 2010
Retrieved from
"http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting%2C_June_1%2C_2010"

References

30. https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2010-May/000285.html
31. http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/Coding_Conventions
32. 
http://clasweb.jlab.org/websvn/prod/filedetails.php?repname=GlueX&path=%2Ftrunk%2Fscripts%2Fbuild_scripts%2Fmake_RH64_link.sh
33. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_do_a_kinematic_fit_for_etapi0p_events
34. https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-physics/2010-May/000101.html
35. http://argus.phys.uregina.ca/cgi-bin/public/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=473
36. http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/Offline_Software
37. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_use_a_pre-built_release
38. https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2010-May/000291.html
39. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/Trigger/DAQ/Monitoring/Controls_Meetings
41. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting%2C_May_18%2C_2010#Minutes
42. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_set_up_the_GlueX_environment
43. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/Progress_toward_constructing_our_own_matrix_classes
46. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting%2C_May_18%2C_2010#GlueX_Software_Workshop
48. http://www.mantisbt.org/
49. http://drupal.org/project/casetracker
50. http://trac.edgewall.org/
53. 
http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/Action_Items_From_Hall_D_Offline_Meetings
55. http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/User:Marki