[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, January 6, 2016

Fri Jan 8 14:57:57 EST 2016

Find the minutes at 
https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_January_6,_2016#Minutes 
and below.
_________________

  GlueX Offline Meeting, January 6, 2016

    Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU*: Curtis Meyer
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *JLab*: Amber Boehnlein, Eugene Chudakov, Mark Ito (chair), David
    Lawrence, Paul Mattione, Dmitry Romanov, Nathan Sparks, Simon
    Taylor, Beni Zihlmann
  * *NU*: Sean Dobbs
  * *UConn*: James McIntyre

      Announcements

  * New sim-recon release: 1.8.0
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2015-December/002188.html>.
    It came out on December 11. I uses the latest versions of JANA and CCDB.
  * ifarm1101 out of the rotation
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-January/002192.html>.
    This was the last of the CentOS 6.2 ifarm nodes. Logins have been
    disabled.

      Review ofminutes from December 9
      <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_December_9,_2015#Minutes>

Sean raised the issue of deleting old pull-request builds last time. 
Mark implemented auto-deletion of builds older than a month via cron job.

      HEP Software Foundation

Amber gave a summary of an effort to collect information and encourage 
collaboration on software systems among high-energy and nuclear physics 
collaborations. The approach is community-based. Seeher slides 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2016/SciCompNews.pptx>for details. The 
Foundation has a website athttp://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/. The 
"knowledge base" is hosted athttp://hepsoftware.org/and Amber has 
already added GlueX. More links are planned.

She highlighted the Packaging Working Group, which is collecting 
information on systems for software distribution within collaborations. 
She encouraged interested parties to subscribe to the mailing list, 
hep-sf-packaging-wg at googlegroups.com .

She also told us about Exascale-2015, a project aiming at a machine of 
hundreds of petaflops. There will be a workshop this summer to discuss 
nuclear physics applications including experimental tasks.

      Offline Monitoring

Paul gave the report. He showed us results from the most recent 
launches, just before the holidays. He did a launch on Spring 15 and 
Fall 15 data sets. He pointed us to theRun Browser, Run 4319 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/cgi-bin/data_monitoring/monitoring/runBrowser.py?run_number=4319&ver=ver01&period=RunPeriod-2015-12>as 
an example. One can clearly pi zeros in the BCAL.

The transition from the old offline monitoring database to the RCDB is 
in progress. Some info in the browser is compromised as a result. Dmitry 
pointed out some of the features of the RCDB data viewer 
athttps://halldweb.jlab.org/rcdb.

      Geant4 Update

David has succeeded in build a new version of the CPP simulation using 
Geant 4.10.2 and Clang 3.7.0. He reports that the problem with 
multi-threaded processing he had seen with previous Geant versions has 
been fixed. Event rate scales with number of threads. He sees some small 
differences between multi-threaded enabled code run with one thread 
versus single-threaded code.

He has added a new generator to sim-recon. It produces muon pairs with a 
coherent photon beam, including polarization effects. The pair 
productions code was adopted from Geant4 and the coherent photon 
generator adopted from Richard Jones's code.

      Upgrade Xerces C++ from 3.1.1 to 3.1.2

Version 3.1.2 of the Xerces C++ librarycame out last March 
<https://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/releases_plan.html>. Mark flashed 
therelease notes 
<https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10510&version=12315014>. 
Mark has built it on all of he platforms and tested it on RHEL7 with the 
b1pi test suite. Nathan has been using this version for his work for 
months now. We will upgrade to this version in the near future.

More generally, we had a discussion on how to handle future version 
upgrades for the low-level software packages that we rely on. Upgrades 
can be disruptive since they force everyone to build a new version of 
the package itself and recompile all packages that depend on it.

During the discussion we spent some time on the plan for going from GCC 
4.4 to 4.8. GCC 4.4 is the default on RHEL/CentOS 6, which appears to be 
common throughout the collaboration. The latest Geant4 and ROOT6 both 
require 4.8 at least.

Curtis suggested we poll the collaboration about which compilers people 
are using at their home institutions.

As far as implementing a change, David suggested making decisions at 
Offline meetings, issuing an announcement in advance of any change 
giving people time to object.

      Review ofrecent pull requests
      <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr>

We skimmed through the list going back to early December.

      Data Challenge 3
      <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Data_Challenge_3>

Mark has generated the fake raw data using recent software, 5000 files 
of 10 GB each. This was done just before the break.

      Future Commissioning Simulations
      <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Sim1_Conditions>

Mark generated a hundred jobs using Tegan's new BCAL code at Sean's 
request. Sean will look over the results.

      New HDPM Documentation

Nathan has transitioned to using the GitHub built-in wiki for Hall D 
Package Manager documentation. Find it 
athttps://github.com/JeffersonLab/hdpm/wiki.

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