[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting, March 2, 2016

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

Please find the minutes reproduced below and at 
https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_March_2,_2016 
.

   -- Mark
__________________________________________


  GlueX Offline Meeting, March 2, 2016, Minutes

There is arecording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/9dy1/>on 
the BlueJeans site.

Present:

  * *CMU*: Naomi Jarvis, Curtis Meyer
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *FSU*: Brad Cannon
  * *JLab*: Sergey Furletov, Mark Ito (chair), Paul Mattione, Dmitry
    Romanov, Nathan Sparks
  * *NU*: Sean Dobbs
  * *UConn*: Richard Jones

	
<https://bluejeans.com/s/9dy1/>
Software Meeting


      Announcements

 1. Deleting legacy builds
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-February/002223.html>.
    They were backed up and deleted.
 2. Lustre upgrade
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/jlab-scicomp-briefs/2016q1/000120.html>.
    The upgrade had to be abandoned for now. SciComp will continue to
    study the upgrade path.
 3. Software Help Forum delayed. Mark had a concern about whether we
    should be mixing scientific paper discussions and software questions
    and answers on the same site. Computer and Network Infrastructure
    (CNI) is putting together a Drupal-based forum for us to test drive.
 4. Paper Review Status. The requested materials have been submitted to
    Graham Heyes:
     1. Responses to recommendations to past software reviews.
     2. Progress in GlueX software since the last review (Feb. 2015)
     3. A revised computing resource need estimate.
          * Mark and Graham are still going back and forth on the
            spreadsheet format.
 5. SWIF Analysis Jobs
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/SWIF_Analysis_Jobs>. Paul
    put together a wiki page on how to get started with the Scientific
    Workflow Indefatigable Factotum (SWIF). He provides a simple set of
    scripts. The system is oriented toward using REST data to do physics
    analysis.
      * Dmitry mentioned that he is interested in a system that starts
        from data in the RCDB and generates a template for batch
        analysis of chosen files. He will talk to Paul about whether
        Paul's system might help with this.


      Review ofminutes from February 3
      <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_February_3,_2016#Minutes>

  * Mark commented that many users are taking advantage of the
    one-node/multi-thread job queue that Scientific Computing (SciComp)
    has put up recently.
  * Dmitry reminded us that the best way to make requests for bug fixes
    or new features is to create an issue on theRCDB GitHub site
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/rcdb>. That way it will not get
    lost in the email shuffle.
      o Note that the RCDB code is still being kept in our Subversion
        repository. Migration of the code to GitHub will not occur until
        after the current run.


      Offline Monitoring

Paul pointed out some features of theMonitoring Plan 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Data_Monitoring_Procedures#Procedures:_Overview>. 
He commented on the three steps during experimental running:

 1. Incoming. This is underway on all new data as it hits the tape library.
 2. Monitoring Launches. He is waiting on calibration constants from the
    Calibration Train to show up before starting.
 3. Initial Reconstruction Launch. We are not there yet.

We decided not to wait for the ultimate constants from calibration and 
go ahead and start a Monitoring Launch on Friday, after Sean has done 
some touch-up to the timing constants. Also since there is not a lot of 
data yet, that launch could go ahead and process all of the data 
collected so far, effectively making it an preliminary Initial 
Reconstruction Launch.

Mahmoud mentioned that the monitoring plugin for the Start Counter is 
not seeing any TDC hits. He and Paul will get together to track down the 
problem.


      Calibration Challenge/Processing
      <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2016-March/002257.html>

Sean described details of the the newly initiated calibration passes on 
recently taken data. Seehis two slides 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/0/02/Sdobbs_OfflineMtg_2Mar16.pdf>for 
all of the bullets. In addition to the calibration steps, he discussed 
doing π^0 skims and a couple of items left to do.

The last of the to-do items prompted a discussion on how we should 
feedback our experience with farm performance to SciComp and what 
metrics should be included in that feedback. We decided to discuss this 
next week after we see how the weekend's launch goes.


      Geant4 Update

Richard has been busy with diamond production lately, a good thing for 
all of us, and will return to work on Geant4 when the run is over.


      C++ version upgrade discussion

After lengthy discussion we settled on June 1, 2016 as the date for 
sim-recon conversion to GCC 4.9. See therecording 
<https://bluejeans.com/s/9dy1/>for details. More precisely, after that 
date code that relies on language features present in that version of 
GCC will be accepted on the sim-recon master branch. When this happens 
collaborators will be required to upgrade their compilers if they have 
not done so.

Nathan agreed to write a wiki page to describe theSoftware Collections 
<https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/devtoolset-3/>system 
that allows installation of binaries for recent versions of GCC (among 
other things) for RedHat and CentOS systems. This has the potential to 
greatly simplify the compiler upgrade process and subsequent 
environmental set-up.


      Photon beam polarization

Curtis called our attention to arecent note from Ken Livingston 
<http://argus.phys.uregina.ca/cgi-bin/private/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=2968>where 
Ken gave his thoughts on how polarization information should be recorded 
and how that information should be used in data analysis. We agreed that 
this was required reading for those who would like to contribute to the 
discussion going forward.

Despite this admonition, we launched into a discussion of dealing with 
shifts of the location of the coherent edge during a run (i. e., beyond 
the photon energy dependence of the polarization for a fixed coherent 
edge position). This lead to whether it should be done by event ranges 
in the CCDB, which would require significant CCDB development, or fixed 
table of event dependent parameters, one table per run which could 
itself be kept in the CCDB.

Mark pointed out that the need for this approach has not been 
demonstrated. Richard thought that it was likely that a thin diamond 
would not be stable. Mark conceded that in the end we would need event 
ranges in the CCDB, if not to handle this problem, then for others that 
might arise. That feature, however, will not be there tomorrow.

In the end we agreed that the first step is to assess the need, and if 
something has to be done, we will do it.

Retrieved from 
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  * This page was last modified on 2 March 2016, at 18:55.


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