[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, November 14, 2012

Wed Nov 14 18:16:07 EST 2012

Find the minutes below and at

 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_November_14,_2012#Minutes
___

GlueX Offline Meeting, November 14, 2012
Minutes

    Present:
      * CMU: Will Levine, Paul Mattione, Curtis Meyer
      * JLab: Mark Ito (chair), David Lawrence, Dmitry Romanov, Sascha
        Somov, Simon Taylor

Announcements

CCDB 0.5

    Mark called our attention to a recent [35]announcement from Dmitry and
    him on the latest release of the calibration database. The code is
    built on three platforms at JLab and there are instructions on how to
    use it with Jana in the file ccdb_0.05/janaccdb/README.txt.

Major changes on JLab batch farm

    Mark went over the [36]recent announcement from Scientific Computing at
    JLab on changes to the batch farm going in today and possibly tomorrow.
    There are many fundamental differences being rolled out in Auger and
    Jasmine so users should be on the lookout for anomalous behavior and
    report any seen. You will have to have a new scientific computing
    certificate to use the farm.

Scientific Software Support Committee

    Mark told us about a new committee that will oversee support for
    scientific software packages at the Lab. Chip Watson proposed the
    existence of the committee and the first meeting was held last week.
    The committee will be joint between Physics and IT. Graham Heyes will
    act as chair. The initial initiative will be to integrate ROOT,
    CERNLIB, Geant4, etc. into the normal support structure of IT Division,
    mainly helpdesk service and documentation. The actual support of the
    packages will remain with the current responsible individuals for now.
    though that may change going forward. In the future the committee may
    help decide which packages should be officially support by IT.

Detector naming scheme

    Elliott called our attention to the [37]detector abbreviation scheme
    Fernando Barbosa has urged us to follow. He noted that there are
    several instances where the naming scheme in the code does not match
    that of Fernando's. We thought that consistency would be nice, but
    questioned whether this was an important front-burner issue for this
    group. We decided to back-burner it and perhaps discuss it again in the
    future.

More on raw data, occupancies and anomalies

    Elliott described recent [38]progress on online monitoring using the
    new EVIO format data. He outlined plans and showed histograms from the
    prototype monitoring plug-ins he has written. He solicits feed back and
    contributions from the detector groups to develop their respective
    packages further.

Review of minutes from the last meeting, geometry changes

    We went over the [39]minutes of the October 31st meeting.

    David recently made some changes to the BCAL geometry to fix volume
    overlaps reported recently by Simon and by Richard some months ago.
    Simon also checked in a change to the FDC geometry so that it matches
    the inner radius of the BCAL. David did a radiation length scan and saw
    an increase in the amount of material inside the BCAL caused by the
    cable material being "revealed" when overlap was removed.

Report from the last Data Challenge Meeting

    We looked over the [40]minutes from the November 5th meeting.

    Mark showed the [41]web page that calls out conditions for the upcoming
    data challenge. He has done small scale tests with the tagged version
    of sim-recon specified there. Paul has started testing this version at
    CMU.

Tracking

    Simon has just checked in a modification to the CDC code to allow the
    geometry to be read in from the HDDS files rather than using hard-wired
    values in the code.

Geometric consistency

    David described a recent feature that allows one to [42]build all of
    the geometry routines from the HDDS package on the fly when building
    HDGeant. In this way, one can script the building of code with multiple
    geometries. This is especially useful when exploring the effect of a
    series of changes in a few parameters of interest. To further reduce
    the possibility of a mismatch between geometry and code, he stores a
    MDA5 sum in HDDM-s that "fingerprints" the geometry configuration that
    was used.

Resources

    David described a new feature of Jana that [43]supports the use of
    resources. In our case, these are files that are too large to be
    conveniently stored in the calibration database, like the magnetic
    field maps. The scheme allows the database to specify only URL of the
    file and not store the data itself. A local cache is maintained so that
    subsequent requests need not involve a network transfer. Mark and
    Dmitry urged David to support a use case where only a relative path and
    file name are returned from the calibration database. The web-site
    information and the absolute path of the root directory of the local
    cache then are controlled globally for a given job, outside of the
    database entry (the latter is already implemented, but the form is
    not). In this case the relative path and file name alone specify the
    file identity, both on the server and in the local cache. This
    eliminates the need for a local file that catalogs the state of the
    local cache. David agreed to make this change.

    Retrieved from
 
"https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_November_14,_2012"

References

   35. 
https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2012-November/001150.html
   36. 
https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/jlab-scicomp-briefs/2012-November/000052.html
   37. https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Detector_naming_scheme
   38. 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/More_on_raw_data,_occupancies_and_anomalies
   39. 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_October_31,_2012#Minutes
   40. 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Data_Challenge_Meeting,_November_5,_2012#Minutes
   41. 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/data_challenge/01/conditions/data_challenge_1.html
   42. https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/images/e/e5/20121114_md5.pdf
   43. 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/images/0/07/20121114_jana_resource_manager.pdf

-- 
Mark M. Ito
Jefferson Lab
marki at jlab.org
(757)269-5295