[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, January 20, 2016

[Mark Ito]

Please find the minutes below and at

https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_January_20,_2016
_____________


  GlueX Offline Meeting, January 20, 2016, Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU*: Naomi Jarvis, Mike Staib
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *JLab*: Mark Ito (chair), David Lawrence, Paul Mattione, Dmitry
    Romanov, Nathan Sparks, Sascha Somov, Justin Stevens, Simon Taylor,
    Beni Zihlmann
  * *NU*: Sean Dobbs
  * *UConn*: James McIntyre


      Announcements

 1. *DL1Trigger added*. David led us throughhis email
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-January/002198.html>.
    Trigger bits from both the GTP and the front panel of the TS are now
    produced from a JANA factory. Sascha will put together a list of
    quasi-permanent trigger bit assignments.
 2. *Upgrade to Xerces-C++ done*. Mark flashed hisemail
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-January/002202.html>from
    last Thursday. Builds of JANA, HDDS, and sim-recon against both
    3.1.1 and 3.1.2 are available, but the default is 3.1.2.
      * Nathan asked about using Xerces-C++ from the various Linux
        distributions rather than building our own. Beni reported
        difficulty doing this under Ubuntu. CentOS6 is at 3.0.1,
        relatively old. We do have the build-our-own thing under control
        as well. We concluded there is no pressure to switch, but it is
        something to keep in mind.
 3. *Compiler Survey Responses In*. Mark told us that most sites report
    that they are using GCC 4.4. As a result we should probably delay
    allowing developers to use language features only supported by more
    recent versions.
 4. *Sim-recon 1.9.0 tagged on GitHub*. Mark made the announcement.
    Notably it includes the new "curving shower" BCAL code from Tegan.
 5. *Paper-based Software Review*. Mark and David reported that Chip
    Watson and Graham Heyes are thinking about having a software review
    where only written reports will be circulated, no visiting
    committee. They have asked for documentation about how we are doing
    with respect to previous review recommendations and significant
    updates on software progress. They would also like us to update our
    computing resource requirement estimates.
 6. *Corrupted files on Lustre*. From the Computer Center website:

Due to a hardware failure over the weekend, a small subset of files on 
the scientific computing Lustre system were lost. This affects files in 
/work, /cache, and /volatile. If your data is affected, file access 
attempts will return the error "Cannot send after transport endpoint 
shutdown". The scientific computing group is working on automatically 
removing the affected files. Users who see this message in the meantime 
should remove the files with the "unlink" command, after which each file 
can be manually recreated. The Scientific Computing group is working 
with the vendor on a long term stability fix for the affected file servers.


      Review ofminutes from January 6
      <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_January_6,_2016#Minutes>

Marksent out the proposal 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/mailman/private/gluex-collaboration/2016-January/004184.html>for*intentional 
gaps in the sequence of run numbers*to the Collaboration. There was not 
a lot of discussion generated. The group putting together sim1 have 
decided to go ahead on the assumption that a run 10,000 start is a good 
guess for the Spring.


      Collaboration Meeting
      <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX-Collaboration-Feb-2016>

Mark canvased the group for those wishing to give a talk. He expects to 
hear from those interested.


      RCDB vs. CCDB for Offline Reconstruction/Analysis

Mark introduced the issue of whether the offline analysis should get 
constants directly from the RCDB or whether we should copy the constants 
to the CCDB and access them from there. There are good arguments on both 
sides. Seehis slides 
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BkOeNoy63qzisLcjdHcahdeFDQlY78sVEJD0k01rpis/edit?usp=sharing>for 
details.

After much discussion, we settled on a two-prong approach:

 1. Dmitry will write a C++ API for the RCDB. This is likely essential
    for some online applications, but will not become part of sim-recon
    right away.
 2. We will also write some scripts to copy data from the RCDB to the
    CCDB and see if any fundamental difficulties reveal themselves.

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  * This page was last modified on 25 January 2016, at 14:50.


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