[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, July 26, 2017

[Mark Ito]

Please find the minutes below and at 
https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_July_26,_2017#Minutes 
.

________________________


    Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU*: Curtis Meyer
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *JLab*: Alexander Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Eugene Chudakov,
    Hovanes Egiyan, Mark Ito (chair), David Lawrence, Dmitry Romanov,
    Justin Stevens, Simon Taylor
  * *MIT*: Cris Fanelli

There is a recording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/lJgeM/> on 
the BlueJeans site. Use your JLab credentials to access it.


      Announcements

 1. Major IT Outage Set for Saturday, July 29, as announced in the
    Weekly Briefs. Central systems will be relocated from the second
    floor of CEBAF Center to the Data Center.
 2. Added capabilities in OSG run scripts
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-July/002869.html>.
    Improvements to the grid submit mechanism from Richard Jones. There
    was subsequent discussion on the email list of further suggestions
    from Sean Dobbs.
 3. Reconstruction Launch: 2017-01 ver01
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-July/002886.html>.
    Alex reviewed items from his email.
 4. Singularity 2.3.1 install for the farm
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/jlab-scicomp-briefs/2017q3/000155.html>
    on CentOS7 nodes.
 5. New sim-recon release: version 2.16.0 and version_2.13.2.xml
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-July/002876.html>
    and new HDPM release
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-July/002877.html>.
    Multiple packages had version upgrades.


      Review of minutes from the last meeting

We looked at minutes from the July 12 meeting 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_July_12,_2017#Minutes>. 


  * *CCDB development*. Dmitry has fixed the crash-at-end-of-job
    problem. It is incorporated in the latest CCDB release (1.06.05). He
    has started on work modernizing the code to use C++11-era smart
    pointers.
  * *Mini-launches started*. Justin reminded us that Sean has started
    simulations for mcsmear development
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-July/002884.html>.


      HDvis update

Dmitry described the current architecture and how we got here. The 
original attempt at a 3-D event display used the EVE package of ROOT. 
Problems EVE and in integration with JANA were many and varied. The 
current scheme uses three.js as the underlying rendering engine with 
events being fed to the browser-based display from a JANA server or read 
directly from a JSON-formatted disk file. Three.js underlies a wide 
variety of web applications (including a STAR event display) and has a 
large user base. See Dmitry's slides 
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JDnQ04ZeXHP8N3hPsoF-H9sZbhZiSWZdd71UPFOcIdo/edit?usp=sharing> 
for architectural diagrams and illustration of other three.js applications.

Thomas demonstrated the current version of HDvis using an example event 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2017/HDvis2/js/event.html>. Time 
evolution of events has been implemented, i. e., an animated view with 
an event time clock, where charged tracks are drawn propagating 
according the event clock, and detector hits "light up" at their 
measured time on the event clock. Further verbal description cannot do 
justice to the demo, which starts at the 38:30 mark in the recording 
<https://bluejeans.com/s/lJgeM/>.

Mark identified two labor-intensive, on-going tasks as described to him 
by Dmitry and Thomas:

 1. translation of JANA objects to JSON format
 2. extraction of geometry information from HDDS

There were a lot of good questions, discussion, and suggestions covering 
a wide variety of topics, overwhelming the secretary. Those that 
contributed are encouraged to restate feedback to the development team 
via any convenient channel, including the issues page on GitHub 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/HDvis/issues>.

As a bonus, virtual reality was trivially implemented. Those at JLab 
were treated to the 3-D VR experience of the event using Thomas's Oculus 
Rift <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift>. This feature elicited 
an OMG from Pittsburgh.


      HDPM Support

Curtis reported that he had contacted GSI about taking on HDPM 
maintenance. They discussed it and turned down the offer. Other avenues 
are being pursued.

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