[Halld-offline] Offline Software Meeting Minutes, May 18, 2018

Tue May 22 12:13:44 EDT 2018

Folks,

The minutes are posted at

https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_May_18,_2018#Minutes

and are reproduced below.

   -- Mark

_____________________

    GlueX Offline Meeting, May 18, 2018, Minutes

Present:

  * *JLab: * Alex Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Mark Ito (chair), David
    Lawrence, Justin Stevens, Simon Taylor, Beni Zihlmann
  * *UConn: * Richard Jones
  * *Yerevan: * Hrach Marukyan

There is a recording of this meeting <https://bluejeans.com/s/Go52V/> on 
the BlueJeans site. Use your JLab credentials to access it.

      Announcements

 1. Software Review, Summer 2018: still no word on the schedule.
 2. LineShape_Library: Thomas announced that he and Simon have started
    work on a ROOT-based lineshape library that extends the repertoire
    provided natively by ROOT, including interference effects between
    resonances with identical final states. See his talk at Workfest
    2018 <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/5/5f/TurnKeyXsec.pdf>
    for details.
 3. David mentioned that there will be an experimental readiness review
    for GlueX II at the end of June. As part of that review, we will
    likely be asked to update our estimates for computing resources.
 4. David also reported that the OSG has lost some component of their
    funding and no new Virtual Organizations (VOs) will be admitted.
    Richard told us that his understanding is that the cut-back is to
    Helpdesk personnel at Indiana University and the freeze on new VOs
    is to inhibit growth of the Helpdesk load.
 5. David reported that he has succeeded running jobs at NERSC using our
    standard container for the system code and our Oasis CVMFS share for
    the user code. No serious difficulties with the scheme were encountered.

      Review of minutes from the May 4 meeting

We reviewed the minutes 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_May_4,_2018#Minutes> 
without a lot of new discussion.

      XROOTD and CVMFS

Sean has suggested that in addition to running an XROOTD server, we also 
run our own CVMFS server and use it instead of Oasis for OSG jobs. This 
would eliminate the concern of using too much space on Oasis.

We discussed the idea. It is not needed in the near term; Oasis is 
working well for us at present. There was some concern that the 
infrastructure behind the CVMFS Oasis share would be hard to match 
(backup, multiple redundant servers). We could start exploring the idea 
on the current Submit Host (scosg16.jlab.org), measure requirements, and 
see if dedicated hardware might be needed.

      Running on the OSG, with and without Singularity

Richard walked us through his new wiki page, HOWTO run jobs on the osg 
in the GlueX singularity container 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_run_jobs_on_the_osg_in_the_GlueX_singularity_container>. 
There are other use cases, where one would like to access the GlueX 
software stack without having to build it in its entirety, in a non-Grid 
context. On one's local desktop for code development, for example. Other 
wiki pages, dealing with these other use cases, are in preparation.

One innovation Richard has developed is the ability to run inside a 
Singularity container on a host without actually having singularity 
installed on the host. I does require modifications to the script that 
invokes any binary executables. This significantly expands the universe 
of compute nodes that we can use on the OSG. Also, by scripting 
distribution of the tar file image of our Oasis share, jobs can be run 
on nodes that do not support CVMFS, another expansion of available nodes.

      Splitting up sim-recon into sim and recon

We have discussed this idea before. Sean has done some work 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Sdobbs_splitting_sim-recon> 
developing a technical approach to splitting the Git repositories. The 
problem is that development of reconstruction and simulation will often 
proceed separately, in particular we may want to improve simulation code 
against a fixed version of the reconstruction where the version of 
reconstruction matches that used in a large reconstruction launch. 
Maintaining a development branch with both simulation and reconstruction 
in the same repository has been found to be difficult.

Justin pointed out that there are some libraries which are used in both 
simulation and and analysis, for example the GlueX AmpTools library, 
where the location of the library, post-split, is not clear. Further, 
there are some libraries, like HDDM that could be split off all by 
themselves and stand apart from both Sim and Recon.

Mark and Sean will put together a proposal on how this should be done 
and present it to the group.

      Review of recent pull requests

We went over the list 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/sim-recon/pulls?q=is%3Aclosed+is%3Apr> 
without significant comment.

      Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List

We went through the list 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21forum/gluex-software> without 
significant comment as well.

  * This page was last modified on 22 May 2018, at 12:11.

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

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