[Halld-offline] Software Meeting Minutes, February 5, 2019

Tue Feb 5 19:45:39 EST 2019

Folks,

Please find the minutes below and here 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_February_5,_2019#Minutes>.

   -- Mark

____________________________________

    GlueX Software Meeting Minutes, February 5, 2019

Present:

  * *CMU: * Curtis Meyer, Naomi Jarvis
  * *JLab: * Shankar Adhikari, Alexander Austregesilo, Thomas Britton,
    Sean Dobbs, Ashley Ernst, Stuart Fegan, Mark Ito (chair), David
    Lawrence, Simon Taylor, Beni Zihlmann
  * *UConn: * Richard Jones
  * *W&M: * Justin Stevens

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

      Announcements

 1. *New version set: version_4.1.0.xml
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2019-February/003511.html>*.
    Mark reviewed the new releases in this version set. There followed a
    discussion of the utility of the new dbg and opt builds. Mark
    pointed out the advantages as outlined in his talk from the January
    8 Software Meeting
    <https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DpaLMUnviTgtJ_SRT6iZcaORcKeKNOdAxzic-LlFLPY/edit?usp=sharing>.
    The sense of the group was that the combination of debug symbols and
    optimization is too valuable to forego, that even in production
    where optimization is essential, seeing the added information from
    debug symbols is important when the code crashes. If this combo is
    built, there is little use for the dbg and opt versions. dbg,
    although it has better behavior with the debugger, uses as much disk
    space as combo but runs slowly. opt, although it is a factor of 10
    smaller than combo, does not have the debug symbols. So despite
    having the dbg/opt plan endorsed on January 8, we will go back to
    combo-only builds.
 2. *Moving version set files to new repository: halld_versions
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/halld_versions>*. Mark will be
    moving the location of the version.xml files from their current
    location in the "dist" directory of /group/halld/www/halldweb/html
    to a new "halld_versions" directory. This is to facilitate export
    and update of builds outside of the JLab CUE.
      * The default version set has always referred to the latest tagged
        build of each package. Sean wondered if rather it should point
        to the last versions used in reconstruction. Beni and Mark
        thought that the current practice was best. New versions come
        out more frequently than reconstruction launches and if the
        corresponding version set is desired, it is available.
 3. *HOW2019 computing workshop: OSG All-Hands + WLCG/HSF: March 18-22
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/cuga/2019-February/002212.html>
    (Indico site
    <https://indico.cern.ch/event/759388/timetable/#20190318>)*. HOW
    refers to "High energy software foundation," "Open science grid,"
    and "Worldwide LHC computing grid." Richard described the upcoming
    meeting at JLab. We will prepare a contribution to the session at
    2:00 on Monday afternoon, "Input from communities/experiments: Input
    from other experiments."
 4. *Slack <https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/c/c7/Capture.PNG>*.
    Mark reported that he created a new channel, #halld, on the Slack
    workspace jlab12gev <https://jlab12gev.slack.com>. Slack
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)> is a modern
    chat/messaging application oriented toward the enterprise. Follow
    this link <https://jlab12gev.slack.com/signup> to join.

      Review of minutes from the January 22 meeting

We went over the minutes 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_January_22,_2019#Minutes>. 

  * The confusion over HDDS geometry has been resolved since the last
    meeting. It remains to create a repository-based build of the
    pre-DIRC geometry so we can have a version of halld_sim with
    consistent builds of hdgeant and mcsmear.
  * David reported that NERSC has realized that our typical workflow is
    not at all like what they normally see. Their projects typically run
    for much longer (days not hours) and with more nodes
    (multiple-multi-core nodes versus one). They are preparing
    suggestions on best practices for us.

      Report from the January 29 HDGeant4 Meeting

We went through the minutes 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/HDGeant4_Meeting,_January_29,_2019#Minutes>. 

  * The problem with "100 times slower" execution of hdgeant and
    hdgeant4, and the simple solution (CKOV=0) was explained at the
    meeting by Richard. Thomas has incorporated the fix into MCWrapper.
  * Thomas has completed the new set of comparison simulations (HDG3 vs.
    HDG4). Folks are looking at the result now.
  * Added in press: Peter Pauli has done an extensive high-level
    comparison of HDG3 vs. HDG4. More on that to come.

      Report from the SciComp Meeting on January 31

We reviewed Sandy Philpott's notes from the meeting 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Report_from_the_SciComp_Meeting_on_January_31>. 
Highlights:

  * Two more ifarm nodes will be deployed soon.
  * Theory jobs on the farm will be pre-emptable by production accounts,
    not by all accounts.
  * Slurm is almost ready to go into production replacing PBS/Maui.
  * More Lustre disk space is coming.
  * More work disk space is not coming.

      XROOTD and GlueX

With help from Sean to get going, Thomas has had some success testing 
XROOTD. He and Kurt Strosahl got a server running on scosg16 (the OSG 
submit host) and Thomas was able to run Monte Carlo on his desktop, 
streaming the random trigger data from scosg16. The initial attempt at 
doing the same on the grid did not work, but note that the 
attempt-on-the-grid count = 1 right now. We recalled that Richard ran a 
proof-of-principle exercise several months ago using a server he stood 
up at UConn.

      ML Monitoring and ML Tracking

Thomas noted that there is a push from Management to explore machine 
learning at the Lab. Some weeks ago he and Dmitry Romanov gave talks at 
the ODU-sponsored Machine Learning Fest. He showed a slide 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/2/2d/20190205_ML_projects.pdf> 
demonstrating his work in classifying BCAL occupancy plots, generated by 
the online monitoring, as either "good" or "bad." He is using 
Keras/TensorFlow <https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/keras>.

David has been doing work using ML to classify tracks based on the raw 
hits alone[?]. The 39 slides following Thomas's one in the pdf file 
linked above describe his work. We ran short of time; he will present 
this material at the next Track Meeting on Thursday.

      Review of recent issues and pull requests

Sean drew our attention to the halld_recon issue he opened today, 
Crashes with analysis library when adding multiple similar reactions #95 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/halld_recon/issues/95>. Alex has some 
ideas about the cause.

      Code Readiness for Reconstruction of Spring 2018

Sean reported on some bugs that he and Simon are working on that need 
fixing before we can go ahead. Simon has also submitted a pull request 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/halld_recon/pull/94> with several 
changes to tracking. Sean will report back when we are ready to proceed.

[Added in press: Simon closed his pull request. He will resubmit the 
bug-fix-like changes as a separate pull request from the more 
fundamental tracking changes. The former will definitely be included in 
the reconstruction launch.]

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