[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, January 9, 2013

[Mark M. Ito]

Find the minutes below and at 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_January_9,_2013#Minutes 
.
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GlueX Offline Meeting, January 9, 2013
Minutes

    Present:
      * CMU: Paul Mattione, Curtis Meyer
      * FSU: Nathan Sparks
      * IU: Matt Shepherd
      * JLab: Mark Ito (chair), Simon Taylor, Dmitry Romanov, Beni Zihlmann

Announcements: AmpTools

    Matt reviewed his [29]recent announcement of a new version of AmpTools,
    now at version 0.5. Although the package is under development all the
    time, recently the user interface has been streamlined and should be
    simpler to use. However, user code must change to be compatible with
    this new version. Matt has changed the relevant code in the repository,
    so to use it one must have the new AmpTools version.

    The functionality is nearly the same as before, a few new features have
    been added.

    Matt reports that he is now collaborating more closely with the group
    at INFN Genoa and they have submitted various feature requests, in
    particular to do fits in terms of moments. Some recent work has also
    been in collaboration with Adam [30]Szczepaniak.

Reconstruction sub-group reports

PID RF Beam Bunch Selection

    Paul reported on his scheme for finding multiple RF beam buckets in
    multi-track events. Reconstructed tracks vote on their preference for
    the event bucket based on their times at the BCAL or TOF. See his
    [31]wiki page for details.

    Mark asked that at some future meeting Paul present some quantitative
    measures of the performance of the algorithm.

Future of reconstruction sub-group reports

    We decided that although very useful in the past, we will drop the
    reports as standing agenda items. Progress in these areas will continue
    to be reported, but on an as-needed basis.

    This raised the issue of our current offline task list. Now that the
    bulk of reconstruction factories have been written, the major issues
    don't fit our task list as well as they used to. Mark will propose a
    list of offline projects that we will track in the future. We can then
    discuss both composition of the list and its scope.

    Dmitry pointed out that there are systems to facilitate software
    project management on a high-level, above that supported by the Mantis
    system we are using. We thought that to start out, we would use some
    ad-hoc system. We can get more formal later if we have to.

Data Challenge Status

    The data challenge is finished now, final tally:
      * CMU: 370 M events
      * JLab: 1 G event
      * Grid: 4 G events

    The next tasks:
     1. Distribute the events. Richard had written a HOWTO on using grid
        tools to access our data. Several of us are learning how to do it.
     2. Archive the events. Mark will try to use the grid tools to copy the
        data to JLab for archiving on the tape library at JLab.
     3. Write a report. We need to capture the things we did and the
        lessons learned from the excercise.
     4. Check the quality. We should do some overall quality checks on the
        data and include them in the report.
     5. Produce reduced-sized data sets. Either by doing skims or writing
        an even more compact format or both.
     6. Evaluate the effect of the level-1 trigger, as configured for the
        data challenge.

CCDB status

    CCDB deployment proceeds; Dmitry and Mark gave a report.
      * There is a [32]wiki page for all things CCDB now.
      * The [33]website is up and running. This can be used for browsing
        the structure of the database and the content of the constant sets.
      * Documentation is starting to come together on the wiki page.
      * A new release of sim-recon that uses the CCDB by default us being
        prepared.
      * Three access methods are available now.
          1. MySQL server at JLab inside the firewall
             (mysql://ccdb_user@hallddb.jlab.org/ccdb)
          2. MySQL server at JLab available read-only, world-wide
             (mysql://ccdb_user@hallddb.jlab.org/ccdb). Note that this has
             the same URL as in (1) but actually resolves to a different
             server on a different subnet at the Lab.
          3. SQLite database. This is a local file that can be used, with
             the full functionality of the MySQL database
             (sqlite:///<path-to-local-file> (this means four /'s, two for
             the access method, one for the null user/host and one from the
             path)). Since it is used from the local disk, no network
             connection is necessary. See the wiki page for instructions on
             where to find the file.
      * Note that the old ascii file-based method will continue to work
        (file://<path-to-calib-directory> (this means three /'s, two for
        the access method and one from the path)).

EVE Event Display

    EVE is a component of ROOT that supports detector event displays via
    the TGeometry classes. Several LHC experiments have implementations.
    Dmitry has been studying the suitability of the system for use by
    GlueX. One motivation is that we already have a program to convert the
    HDDS geometry into appropriate ROOT classes. Dmitry showed [34]some
    preliminary pictures that he put together last month to demonstrate
    what could be done. He thinks that we can run the display as a JANA
    plug-in, and thus have full access to the reconstruction objects as
    well as the raw hits, though this is yet to be done. He will continue
    to explore feasibility, concentrating on what is required from a JANA
    interface.

    Retrieved from
"[35]https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_January_9,_2013"

References

   29. 
https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2013-January/001238.html
   30. http://www.pronouncenames.com/pronounce/szczepaniak
   31. 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Mattione_GlueX_Analysis_Factories#RF_Beam_Bunch_Selection_.26_PID_Details
   32. https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Calibration_Database
   33. https://halldweb1.jlab.org/ccdb/
   34. https://halldweb1.jlab.org/talks/2013-1Q/UsingEveDecember2012.pptx