[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Mintues, March 22, 2017

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

Please find the minutes below and at 
https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_March_22,_2017#Minutes 
.

   -- Mark

________________________________


    Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU*: Naomi Jarvis, Curtis Meyer
  * *FIU*: Mahmoud Kamel
  * *Glasgow*: Peter Pauli
  * *JLab*: Alex Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Brad Cannon, Eugene
    Chudakov, Hovanes Egiyan, Sergey Furletov, Mark Ito (chair), David
    Lawrence, Paul Mattione, Dmitry Romanov, Nathan Sparks, Simon
    Taylor, Beni Zihlmann
  * *NU*: Sean Dobbs
  * *UConn*: Richard Jones

There is a recording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/AYd1J/> on 
the BlueJeans site.


      Announcements

 1. *New simple email list: duplicate_cache*. See Mark's email message
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-February/002656.html>.
    Subscribers get a weekly list of files on the cache disk that are in
    conflict with the tape library. Action is required in that case.
 2. *CCDB 1.06.03*. There is a new sub-minor release of CCDB
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/ccdb/releases/tag/v1.06.03> that
    corrects one of the example Python example scripts.
 3. *Upcoming SWIF features*. Sean gave us a heads up about new features
    that Chris Larrieu is working on. Sean had actually asked for them
    some time ago. They include:
      * ability to change and modify tags
      * specify jobs that need to run before the job of interest runs
      * specify files that need to exist before running
      * query a URI about whether it is safe to run or not.
 4. *MCwrapper changes and progress*. Thomas reports a lot of changes
    recently to add versatility. It can now use HDGeant or HDGeant4, as
    specified by the user, and can generate events using genr8,
    genEtaRegge, genTwoPiAmps[?], and bggen. Event merging will be added
    now that that mechanism is available. The code and examples are
    available on GitHub
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/hd_utilities/tree/master/MCwrapper>.
 5. *New release of HDPM* is coming soon. Nathan will adding to the list
    of pre-built packages (including Geant4).


      Review of minutes from the last meeting

We looked at the minutes from March 8 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_March_8,_2017#Minutes>. 


There will be a meeting next week of people interested in the 
*contribution of university resources to the OSG*, as Richard proposed. 
Contact Mark if you are interested.


      Plugin linking change proposal

David went through his post to the help list 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/gluex-software/QhiTV5q2cHg> 
proposing that we drop search of the standard sim-recon libraries when 
building plugins. There is considerable savings in disk footprint and 
build time by doing this. The required libraries would come in via the 
main binary, e. g., hd_root. The fear is that this scheme may not work 
on all operating systems.

Sean suggested we at least test is on CentOS 7 before unleashing it on 
the master branch of sim-recon. Nathan pointed out that the pull request 
alone will automatically kick-off a test on that platform including a 
runs with plug-ins. We agreed that David should go ahead and issue the 
pull request.

Mark then mentioned two other measures we could take to reduce the size 
of the builds and the time it takes to build them.

 1. Build both debug and non-debug versions of the code, but only retain
    the non-debug version for older, non-default versions. That would
    result in a net savings of disk space.
 2. Only build a subset of the plugins.

Reaction to these proposals were mixed. Mark will go away and think.


      RCDB/CCDB Plans

Dmitry presented a list of items 
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VyREyJygfBNz9pra3-1FIM7YUNo3Q8EopmhhUvAcVW0/edit?usp=sharing> 
that he has started working on now that his visit has begun.

  * RCDB performance had degraded. He found ways to restructure the SQL
    queries to vastly improve performance.
  * There is a large basket of CCDB issues to address. He identified
    those that will get the highest priority.
      o Sean commented that emphasis should be placed on the functional
        items rather than the presentational ones. Also he would like to
        see log filtering and a JavaScript API for the CCDB.


      JANA 0.7.8

David described features in the new release of JANA 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/f/fe/20170322_jana_updates.pdf>. 
He highlighted two.

 1. *XML geometry in CCDB*. This will allow run-dependent handling of
    the geometry as Sean has proposed
    <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_December_7,_2016#Geometry_Issues_in_sim-recon>.
 2. *janaview plugin*. New life breathed into an old feature. This
    plugin enables GUI-base browsing of the JANA data structures
    including graphical presentation of factory dependencies. You need
    to look at the slides to get the idea.


      Merging events into a simulated data stream

Richard has released a new version of mcsmear that will combine real 
events with Monte Carlo events in user-controlled proportions. His email 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-March/002686.html> 
describes the new feature and how to access it.

He gave us further explanation on a few points:

  * If any of the real-event files runs out of events, then mcsmear will
    go back to the beginning of the file and re-use the events in the
    file, ring-buffer-like.
  * If there are collisions (hits in a particular channel from multiple
    sources) they are combined or kept separate according the the
    double-pulse resolution parameter stored in the CCDB for the
    detector in question.
  * Syntactically, hits are merged with an overloaded "+=" operator.
  * There is an option to insert a time-shift parameter so that all
    events from a real event source can be added at an arbitrary time
    offset with respect to the simulated event.
  * The mixing of multiple real-event streams is accomplished by using a
    stream of null events as the input simulated stream. Richard has
    provided a null event generator for this purpose.


      Review of recent pull requests

We went over the list 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pulls?q=is%3Aclosed+is%3Apr>.

Sean fixed the problem with DBCALGeometry 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pull/767> that Naomi reported 
last time.

Richard noted that there are a lot of old issues still open on the 
sim-recon GitHub site 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/issues>. People are 
encouraged to review any issues they have opened in the past and close 
them if they have been taken care of.


      New Build Need

With recent changes we probably need a new build with updated versions 
of ROOT, CCDB, JANA, HDDS, and sim-recon. Mark will work on it.


-- 
marki at jlab.org, (757)269-5295

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