[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, September 2, 2015

[Mark Ito]

Colleagues,

Find the meeting minutes reproduced below and at

https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_September_2,_2015#Minutes 
.

   -- Mark
   ________________________________________________


  GlueX Offline Meeting, September 2, 2015, Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU*: Curtis Meyer, Mike Staib
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *FSU*: Brad Cannon, Aristeidis Tsaris
  * *JLab*: Alex Barnes, Amber Boehnlein, Mark Dalton, Mark Ito (chair),
    Paul Mattione, Eric Pooser, Nathan Sparks, Justin Stevens, Simon
    Taylor, Beni Zihlmann
  * *UConn*: Richard Jones, James McIntyre

There is arecording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/8xII/>on 
the BlueJeans site.


      Announcements

 1. The*location of the nightly builds*at JLab has changed.
      * Old location example:
          o |/u/scratch/gluex/nightly/2015-09-02/sim-recon|
      * New location example:
          o |/u/scratch/gluex/nightly/2015-09-02/Linux_RHEL6-x86_64-gcc4.4.7/sim-recon|

    See thenightly builds wiki page
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Nightly_Builds_of_GlueX_Software>for
    more on the system.

 2. *Sim-recon 1.5.1 has been released*. Therelease notes
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/releases/tag/1.5.1>are
    posted at GitHub.
 3. We are now*deleting CCDB SQLite databases older than one year*.
    Formerly we were never deleting the monthly files. See thewiki page
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/SQLite-form_of_the_CCDB_database#Archive_of_SQLite_Files>describing
    the system for more information.
 4. After filling up last week, our*work disk was expanded*from 14 to 15
    TB. Further expansion will require movement of the partition to a
    new file server.
 5. Mailman.jlab.org has been blocked from off-site for the past week or
    two due to cyber attacks. This restricts access to the mail archives
    and list administration pages, but does not affect the operation of
    the email lists. Access is not restricted from inside the JLab firewall.
 6. Mark drew our attention to hisnew note on GlueX builds
    <http://argus.phys.uregina.ca/cgi-bin/public/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=2793>.
 7. Kei gave a report on the last launch. Seehis slides
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/1/10/2015-09-02-offline_monitoring.pdf>for
    the details.
      * There were a lot of problems this time.
      * Kei continues to feedback to Chris Larrieu on SWIF developments.
      * The memory footprint of the jobs nearly doubled.
      * The next launch is scheduled for September 12.


      Review of minutes from August 19

We went overthe minutes 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_August_19,_2015#Minutes>.


        Hall D Package Manager

Nathan made changes to support the use of a version.xml to create 
templates, as per feedback from the meeting.


        Flash ADC Pulse Processing

David convened a meeting of the interested parties. We will ask for a 
report at a future meeting.


        Who is responsible for deleting Git branches?

Our policy of having the branch creator delete branches after they have 
been merged is still in place, though compliance has been spotty.


        Clang on the CUE

Nathan reported that Clang is already in stalled on the ifarm, but was 
compiled against GCC 4.8.3, whereas the default compiler there is GCC 
4.4.7. That means that all packages might have to be compiled with the 
newer version. The system for supporting that for GlueX software has not 
been worked out.


      Geant4 Update

  * Richard has now configured the geometry to have the same magnetic
    field in all layers. This makes it insensitive to the algorithm
    Geant4 uses for picking the field-setting geometry layer. He is
    deferring an evaluation of the CPU cost of keeping the field on in
    the calorimeter volumes for a later stage of development work.
  * He looked at how the current implementation performs with
    multi-threading turned on in Geant4. Initially the program was
    crashing. He traced the problem to a bug in the way geometry
    information is shared by threads. David had previously seen this and
    a fix was attempted by the Geant4 team. Unfortunately, the fix leads
    to other serious problems. Richard has put together his own patch in
    user code so he can keep going. He has also communicated his ideas
    for a more fundamental fix to the Geant4 folks.
  * With multi-threading working properly, he sees perfect scaling of
    performance on an 8-core machine, up to 6 threads (as high as he tried).
  * The next step is to put together an end-to-end scheme for hit
    generation for a single detector system. That way others who might
    want to contribute will have a complete example to follow. He is
    planning on doing this with the CDC.


      Collaboration Meeting Agenda

We discussed the agenda for the upcomingCollaboration Meeting 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX-Collaboration-Oct-2015>, 
October 8-10, 2015 at Jefferson Lab. Possible talks and speakers are:

  * Overview talk in including data challenge 3 report (Mark)
  * Geant4 Development Update (Richard)
  * Version Management System (Mark)
  * Offline Monitoring and SWIF (Kei)
  * Calibration Overview (Sean Dobbs)


      Data Challenge 3 update

Mark has run through the fake raw data set twice now. He showedplots 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Data_Challenge_3>of the number 
of jobs in various stages of batch farm progress as a function of time. 
The fluctuations are large and depend largely on what other users on the 
farm are doing.

He is currently working on converting the job submission process to use 
SWIF to see if that helps throughput.


      Commissioning Simulations

Mark transmitted some thoughts from Sean, sent in an email.

  * *Spring 2015 Commissioning Simulations
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Spring_2015_Commissioning_Simulations>*.
    The plan is to generate a few thousand files with the latest tagged
    sim-recon version only for run 9306.
  * *Fall 2015 Commissioning Simulations*. Sean thought we should start
    a discussion about how to set conditions for simulations for a
    possible Fall run. The Calibration Group has already decided to
    require a separate CCDB variation name.
      o Justin thought that we should have production underway by the
        time of the collaboration meeting so people can estimate yields
        for the run.
      o Given the uncertainty in the conditions we might have, we
        thought that we will probably have to just pick some parameters
        and simulate those, say a 9 GeV coherent edge and 1300 A magnet
        current.


      Some problems with F125 algorithms?

Mike led us throughhis recent email 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2015-August/002138.html>describing 
problems related to FADC hit in the BCAL with negative pulse integrals. 
The problem occurs for Mode 7 data and can be understood by looking at 
Mode 8 data where the read-out threshold is greater than 1/2 the peak 
amplitude. The result is early times for pulses late in the window.

We noted that there are two approaches on could take for Mode 8 data: 
emulated the Mode 7 algorithm, bugs and all, or modify the algorithm to 
give rational results in the problematic cases. There is a group meeting 
(see Review of Minutes above) on the emulation and we thought that they 
would very likely be working on an formulating an approach to the problem.


      Action Items

  * Convert DC3 to use SWIF (Mark)
  * Re-do Spring simulation with new release (Mark)
  * Implement a complete hit generation scheme for the CDC in Geant4
    (Richard)

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  * This page was last modified on 3 September 2015, at 21:02.


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