[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, April 13, 2016

Wed Apr 13 22:13:20 EDT 2016

Please find the minutes below and at http://bit.ly/1SBdCJO .
_________________

  GlueX Offline Meeting, April 13, 2016, Minutes

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

Present:

  * *CMU*: Naomi Jarvis, Curtis Meyer, Mike Staib
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *JLab*: Mark Ito (chair), Paul Mattione, Sandy Philpott, Dmitry
    Romanov, Nathan Sparks, Justin Stevens, Simon Taylor
  * *NU*: Sean Dobbs

<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/File:Offline_meeting_2016-04-13.png> 

Software Meeting

      Announcements

 1. RCDB News
      * The C++ API is ready. Dmitry pointed us to therelevant section
        of the RCDB wiki
        <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/rcdb/wiki/Cpp>. It requires
        C++11 to compile.
      * SQLite versions of the RCDB are now generated nightly. You can
        download the latest version
        fromhttps://halldweb.jlab.org/dist/rcdb.sqlite.
 2. Collaboration Meeting, May 9-11, 2016. TheCollaboration Meeting
    Agenda
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX-Collaboration-May-2016>gives
    the offline almost two hours.
      * Paul will give a talk on monitoring.
      * Sean will give a talk on calibration.
      * We will collectively think about other talks.

      Improved JANA Locks

Paul explained the situation.

 1. The locks that have been modified are specific to different "areas"
    of the code; there is now differentiation between a special purpose
    locks and the global thread lock. The areas are:
     1. plugins
     2. actions
     3. factories
 2. The new scheme requires use of anew JANA release: 0.7.5
    <https://www.jlab.org/JANA/downloads.php>.
 3. The crucial change came in withPull request #331
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pull/331>.
 4. Paul sent anemail
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-April/002300.html>on
    Monday warning us about the need for use of the new JANA release.
 5. Mark released anew version of sim-recon
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-April/002303.html>,
    version 1.11.0, that incorporates these changes.
 6. Paul put together awiki page
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Locking_in_JANA>giving
    best practices for using locks with JANA, inspired by the code he
    discovered during his review of the locks in our code.
 7. Paul also showedsome slides
    <http://argus.phys.uregina.ca/cgi-bin/private/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=2992>contrasting
    the new lock discipline versus the lack thereof showing much
    improved multi-thread scaling.

      Review of minutes from March 30

We went over theminutes from March 30 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_March_30,_2016#Minutes>.

  * *Future Trends in Nuclear Physics Computing Workshop*. Amber and
    Mark had a conference call with Richard Jones, our virtual
    organization representative, to plan out the next step in enhancing
    JLab involvement with theOpen Science Grid
    <http://www.opensciencegrid.org/>.
  * *Access to Fairshare Information from JLab Farm*. We asked Sandy
    about getting the current fairshare statistics posted somewhere. She
    told us that it will be there on the new webpages that SciComp is
    working on. Mark suggested that at some point someone from SciComp
    should give presentation to this group about the new site.

      Calibration Challenge/Processing

Sean presented aslide 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/d/d4/Sdobbs_OfflineMtg_13Apr16.pdf>bringing 
us up-to-date with calibration activity.

  * He described the parameters of the three launches started so far.
    One set of statistics not on the slide:

Launch Number 	Number of Farm Jobs
1 	6,000
2 	3,000
3 	3,500

  * The CCDB improvements he has discussed with Dmitry address ease of
    handling of calibration constants and possible calibration
    visualization ideas.
  * The benchmark jobs are to explore performance as a function of the
    number of threads. Sean is hoping that Paul's recent improvements
    will help the situation here as well.

      sim-recon scripts

Paul hasproposed 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Letter_from_Paul_to_Mark>moving the 
scripts that generate analysis plugin templates from the scripts 
directory in the Subversion repository to a new directory of the 
sim-recon repository (Git). That way these scripts will be versioned 
along with releases of sim-recon. That, in turn, would disambiguate 
which version of the scripts should be used with which version of sim-recon.

We all agreed that this is a good idea, but Nathan wanted to think about 
whether there might be a more appropriate location than that proposed by 
Paul. We agreed to let him make an alternate proposal before we make the 
move.

      FADC Emulation Partial Re-Write

We looked atRichard's recent pull request 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pull/318>. The situation 
seems to be well in hand.

      SWIF for GlueX Users

Mahmoud reminded thatPaul's guide to SWIF for GlueX Analysis Users 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-February/002244.html>had 
been discussed previously. He is using the system himself.

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  * This page was last modified on 13 April 2016, at 22:07.

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