[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, November 15, 2017

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

Please find the minutes below and at

https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_November_15,_2017#Minutes 
.

   - Mark

_________________________


    Minutes of the GlueX Offline Meeting, November 15, 2017


Present:

  * *CMU: *: Curtis Meyer
  * *FSU *: Brad Cannon, Sean Dobbs
  * *JLab: *: Alex Austregesilo, Alex Barnes, Thomas Britton, Mark Ito
    (chair), Elton Smith
  * *MIT *: Cris Fanelli
  * *W&M *: Justin Stevens
  * *Yerevan *: Hrach Marukyan

There is a recording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/8JOiH/> on 
the BlueJeans site. Use your JLab credentials to access it.


      Announcement

New releases, AmpTools 0.9.3, sim-recon 2.19.0 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-November/002990.html>. 
These came out November 2. See the release notes for details.


      Review of minutes from the last meeting

We went over the minutes from November 1 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_November_1,_2017#Minutes>. 


  * *MCwrapper. * Thomas reported on new features.
      o He has been working on supporting output samples that are
        run-by-run proportional to the size of real runs within a user
        specified range.
      o With Sebastian Cole and Sean he has been working on a feature
        where the BGRATE parameter to HDGeant(4) is generated
        automatically depending on the beam intensity of the
        corresponding real run. This will be implemented as a
        stand-alone C++ program using Richard's coherent bremsstrahlung
        library.
  * *HDvis. * Some items from Thomas.
      o Changes to recent changes to sim-recon broke the EVIO to JSON
        conversion. Thomas has fixed this.
      o The GCC compatibility problem reported last time was solved by
        using the regex function from the boost libraries rather than
        getting them from std::.
      o There is currently a problem where events pile up in the display
        rather than being rendered one by one. Cool visual effect, but
        not very useful.
      o HDvis will not run on all nodes in the counting house. It
        depends on the particular video driver being used. Diagnosed by
        running glxgears.
  * *Work Disk Clean-Up. * Mark reported that the initial rsync to the
    new work server is almost done after almost two weeks. We will make
    the decision on when to cut over depending on circumstances once the
    rsync is done.


      Organizing AmpTools-Based Event Generators

Justin presented slides outlining a proposal 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2017/CommonAmpGen.pdf> for streamlining 
development and maintenance of our event generators, resident in the 
sim-recon tree, that depend on the AmpTools package. Please see his 
slides for details. Some summary points:

  * New generators of this type are created by cutting and pasting code
    from existing generators. This results not only in duplication of
    code, but duplication of constants, such as particle masses and beam
    characteristics.
  * There are sections of the code that could be isolated and coded in a
    more general way with behavior controlled by input parameters and
    constants obtained from known, trusted sources. This would make the
    code more concise and less prone to errors. Among these sections are:
     1. beam energy distribution
     2. beam polarization
     3. SDMEs used in amplitude generation
     4. decay chain specification
     5. properties of common resonances
     6. algorithms for generating according to phase space
     7. methods for creating the HDDM output
     8. event-by-event random number seed insertion (Alex A.)
  * There was general agreement that we should go ahead with the plan.
  * Sean suggested a document on the wiki putting words to the proposal
    outlined in the slides, i. e., a conceptual design. Justin agreed to
    write it.
  * Alex A. volunteered to work on the decay chain specification,
    resonance properties, and phase space generation.


      Review of recent pull requests

We went through the list 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr>. 
Some discussion was generated.

  * Alex A's event-by-event random number specification in event
    generators has already been implemented (Pull Request #972
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pull/972>).
  * Alex A.'s code to compute moments from an AmpTools fit (Pull Request
    #958 <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pull/958>) requires
    the GNU Scientific Library. This is already available on all nodes
    at JLab, but it has to be added to the list of packages that must be
    installed since it is not always part of a minimal Linux distribution.
  * Thomas will incorporate Sean's J/ψ generator into MCwrapper. The
    generator came into sim-recon with Pull Request #952
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pull/952>


      Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List

We looked over the list 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21forum/gluex-software>, without much 
comment.


      gluex_install on Ubuntu

Mark mentioned that the complete build of the GlueX software stack on 
Ubuntu is broken at present. The Ubuntu-specific parts are behind the 
times; they did not get a refresh after HDGeant4 was introduced. In 
particular, some packages required by Geant4/HDGeant4 are not on the old 
list. Mark is working on it. There should be an announcement soon.

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

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