[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, March 30, 2016

Wed Apr 6 21:32:38 EDT 2016

Please find the minutes below and at http://tinyurl.com/hjvnnko ,
____________________

  GlueX Offline Meeting, March 30, 2016, Minutes

There is arecording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/9n7o/>on 
the BlueJeans site.

Present:

  * *CMU*: Mike Staib
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *FSU*: Brad Cannon
  * *JLab*: Alex Barnes, Mark Ito (chair), David Lawrence, Paul
    Mattione, Sandy Philpott, Dmitry Romanov, Nathan Sparks, Justin
    Stevens, Simon Taylor
  * *NU*: Sean Dobbs

<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/File:Offline_2016-03-30.png>
Software Meeting

      Announcements

 1. sim-recon version 1.10.0 was released
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/releases/tag/1.10.0>on
    March 8.
 2. Change to Farm Priority Scheme
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/jlab-scicomp-briefs/2016q1/000121.html>.
    The "exclusive" queue is now a thing of the past. Exclusive use of a
    node is still available by requesting the requisite number of cores
    in the Auger request. The change was made on March 10.

      Review ofminutes from March 2
      <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_March_2,_2016#Minutes>

TheRCDB source code repository <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/rcdb>has 
migrated to GitHub. The Subversion repository is no longer the 
authoritative source of the code. Previously, only the wiki for the 
GitHub repository was being used.

      Reconstruction Scaling
      <http://argus.phys.uregina.ca/cgi-bin/private/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=2984>

Paul presented slides on his study of the multi-thread scaling behavior 
of the offline jobs. He looked at two cases: the loaded-with-32-plugin 
offline monitoring jobs and a 2-plugin-rest-producing jobs. Each case 
was tried with a range of threads. Clear memory saving is seen with 
multiple threads. Scaling is generally good, but the curves turn over 
when then number of threads gets comparable to the number of cores, 
especially with the histogram-heavy offline monitoring jobs.

Please seehis slides 
<http://argus.phys.uregina.ca/cgi-bin/private/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=2984>for 
details and plots.

      Calibration Challenge/Processing

Sean described his experience with the March 18 Calibration Train 
Journey. For the final pass, he is creating raw data skims for 
calibration purposes. For this pass he sees a sweet spot at eight 
threads. For details, please seehis slides 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/f/f8/Sdobbs_OfflineMtg_30Mar16.pdf>.

      NSB not quite zero

Mike described the "feature" of the F250 firmware whereby a requested 
value of the number of samples before the pulse (NSB) of zero was not 
accepted. Instead a value of one is used. This was causing an error in 
the pedestal subtraction; the number of samples was always one more than 
expected. The change is explained inhis recent email 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-cal/2016-March/001241.html>to 
the Calibration Group.

A pull request will be submitted soon.

The configuration files have been changed to request NSB = 1, a request 
that the firmware will honor.

      CCDB Improvements

Dmitry previewed changes coming with version 1.07 of the CCDB. Seehis 
slides 
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wk7SYDhmOdZM0smBDGda4QeonT90Q4SWlhD-7ZA0pME/edit?usp=sharing>for 
all of the details.

There was some discussion of a new scheme that allows a one-to-many 
relation between calibration constants (the one) to run number 
assignments (the many). In other words, one set of calibration constants 
can be applied to different run ranges; the constants themselves need 
not be duplicated in the database. The advantage of this feature is that 
the equivalence of constants for one run range with those of another can 
be tested by comparing the constant set references without h having to 
compare the constants themselves. This feature also simplifies copying 
constants from one range to another; one simply copies the reference. 
This idea was described in the original design document of the CCDB.

      Future Trends in Nuclear Physics Computing Workshop

We reviewed theagenda 
<https://www.jlab.org/conferences/trends2016/program.html>from the 
workshop held two weeks ago. David gave a talk; Mark appeared on a panel.

There was a discussion with Amber and Frank Wuerthwein of the OSG on 
exploring JLab enhancing our facility with the use of OSG resources. 
This will be pursued initially through the GlueX VO with Richard, our 
contact person.

      Access to Fairshare Information from JLab Farm

We agreed to ask SciComp for access to the priority information that 
heretofore has only been available from occasional emails.

      HDPM Update

Nathan described the latest. Seehis slides 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2016/hdpm_03-30-16.pdf>for the details.

His second slide on recent changes:

 1. Setup file can be sourced from any directory
 2. Use hdpm commands from any directory
 3. Option added for passing subdirectory of sim-recon to "build" command
 4. Added "hdpm run" command

The last item allows users to run an arbitrary command in a target 
environment set-up by HDPM.

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  * This page was last modified on 6 April 2016, at 21:28.

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