[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, December 21, 2016

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

Please find the minutes below and at 
https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_December_21,_2016#Minutes 
.

   -- Mark

__________________________


  GlueX Offline Meeting, December 21, 2016, Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU*: Naomi Jarvis, Curtis Meyer
  * *JLab*: Alexander Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Brad Cannon, Sean
    Dobbs, Sergey Furletov, Mark Ito (chair), Mahmoud Kamel
  * *MIT*: Cristiano Fanelli
  * *UConn*: Richard Jones
  * *W&M*: Justin Stevens

There is a recording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/dnUl2/> on 
the BlueJeans site.


      Announcements

 1. *CentOS 7 upgrades; farm outages for relocation Dec 19-20
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/jlab-scicomp-briefs/2016q4/000131.html>*.
    Conversion of farm nodes to CentOS7 continues. Monday and Tuesday
    several nodes were physically relocated in the Data Center.
 2. *Problems with reading recent data with many threads
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-December/002567.html>*.
    This problem appears to be due to corruption in the raw data. The
    cause is under investigation.


      Review of minutes from the last meeting

We went over the minutes from December 7 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_December_7,_2016#Minutes>. 


  * We will have to have a discussion about whether HDDS XML files will
    continue to be present in the Git repository once they are served
    from the CCDB. If they remain, it might be confusing, but it will be
    what we are used to.
  * Sean pointed out that work with the new scheme for access to HDDS
    information should be coordinated with work on the new event viewer.


      Report from the JLab Computing Steering Committee Meeting

Mark gave the report. This is a standing meeting which is called every 
few months. It is the forum where IT Division reports progress to all of 
the various computing stakeholders around the lab. Mark flashed slides 
from CNI 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks_secure/2016/ITSC_Dec2016_CNI_V2.pdf> 
and SciComp 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks_secure/2016/IT%20Steering%20Committee%20Dec%202016%20SciComp.pdf> 
to illustrate the scope of the subjects covered (slides are password 
protected, username starts with "g", ends in "x", password that of the 
our document portal thing).


      Launches

Alex gave the report. He had remarks beyond those in his email 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-December/002570.html> 
from earlier in the week.

  * There has been a large reduction in the memory needed to run the
    analysis launch since it got started. There were several changes
    that Paul Mattione made to the analysis libraries to do this. In the
    beginning, jobs were run using only 18 threads of the 72
    hyperthreads available on the farm nodes. Now all 72 can be used,
    although the job speed only increased by a a factor of two. Now the
    jobs use 50 GB of the 64 GB available.
  * He would like to start the "real" monitoring launch before the
    break. Sean mentioned that there are still some calibrations that
    need to get finished before the launch can start, namely timing in
    the tagger, PS, and TOF.
  * The wiki page describing the second analysis launch on the Spring
    data is in preparation. There are a lot more channels to catalog
    this time. There was an effort to eliminate plugins for channels
    that were made redundant by the Mitchell Omni-plugin, but there
    still may be some reduction possible.


      Sim 1.2

Sean is almost ready with the necessary mcsmear parameters. He is 
looking at the following systems:

  * Start Counter. He is looking at whether tracking uncertainties are
    adding a significant amount to the measured resolution. If so those
    effects should not be attributed to the intrinsic start counter
    resolution.
  * FDC. He is tuning some of the thresholds being applied for the FDC
    cathodes.
  * CDC. Some checks on the efficiency plug-in are planned.

We talked about generating electromagnetic background for the simulated 
events. Right now this is dominating the CPU time need. Sean has plans 
for overlaying the hits from real data on the simulated hits.


      HDGeant4 Update

Richard gave us a report.

  * He has added the geometry for the DIRC and the triplet polarimeter
    and is working on hit generation for the DIRC now.
  * The boost libraries are required to build HDGeant4. These are
    available as optional packages in most Linux distributions.
  * Event generation for triplet events will be done inside of HDGeant4
    itself and not in an external generator program. If this
    functionality is required, you need to build Richard's DiracXX
    package, available from GitHub (it is one of his public repositories).
  * Mark and Nathan Sparks are working on automated builds.
  * If folks find problems or have suggestions, they should open an
    issue on GitHub <https://github.com/rjones30/HDGeant4/issues>.


      Upcoming OSG Service at JLab

Richard announced a new facility at JLab for job submission to the Open 
Science Grid (OSG). There will be a new box installed at the lab, 
spec'ed out by the OSG folks, with the latest OSG software stack 
installed and an robust network connection to the outside world. The box 
will be administered by SciComp. Users can log in with their CUE 
credentials. To submit jobs from the GlueX Virtual Organization, one 
needs a personal OSG credential, available through Richard. See [[Using 
the Grid|his wiki page on OSG use] for instructions on how to obtain one.

This is a pilot project at present. If it proves to be successful and 
easy to use it could give a big boost in opportunistic computing power 
widely available to all collaborators.


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