[Halld-offline] HDGeant4 Meeting Minutes, October 22, 2019

[Mark Ito]

Please find the minutes here 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/HDGeant4_Meeting,_October_22,_2019#Minutes> 
and below.


    HDGeant4 Meeting, October 22, 2019, Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU: * Naomi Jarvis
  * *FSU: * Sean Dobbs
  * *JLab: * Alex Austregesilo, Mark Ito (chair), Igal Jaegle, Keigo
    Mizutani, Simon Taylor, Beni Zihlmann
  * *UConn: * Richard Jones

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

Note: many of the agenda items were held over from the Software Meeting 
that should have happened last week.


      Review of minutes from the last Software Meeting

We went over minutes from the meeting on September 17 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_September_17,_2019#Minutes>. 


  * Sascha Somov has checked in a fix for the *tagger energy
    determination*. He has created a new CCDB table to do so, but so far
    it is only populated for PrimEx runs. The software senses the
    presence of the table and uses it if it is available.
  * On *software versions and calibration constant comparisons*, Sean
    revised his approach for the FCAL gain constant used in Monte Carlo
    to use a new CCDB calibration table. This restores backward
    compatibility of the code with legacy calibration constant sets. See
    halld_sim pull request #75
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/halld_sim/pull/75>.
  * *CCDB Ancestry Control* Mark has discussed this with Dmitry. Dmitry
    has a relatively easy solution. They will work on the exact
    implementation.


      Report from SciComp Meeting

Mark reviewed his notes from the SciComp meeting 
<https://markito3.wordpress.com/2019/10/21/scicomp-october-17-2019/> 
held on October 17.

  * New farm nodes are due in at the end of the month. They have AMD
    Rome processors.
  * The farm will get an upgrade from RHEL 7.2 to 7.7 in the coming weeks.
      o Beni urged us to make sure our code works with a RHEL 7.7 system
        as soon as one becomes available.
  * Slurm was upgraded on the server when the server was moved to more
    robust hardware.
  * There was an issue where the firewall between the farm network
    enclave and the general computing network would get pinned. This
    could cause a slowdown in ifarm response. A new firewall is on order.
  * Brad Sawatzky from Hall C has reported seeing dead-locking
    <https://jlab.service-now.com/nav_to.do?uri=%2Fincident.do%3Fsys_id%3Daf9be5bbdb1088507d37365e7c96195c%26sysparm_view%3Dess%26sysparm_record_target%3Dincident%26sysparm_record_row%3D7%26sysparm_record_rows%3D71%26sysparm_record_list%3Dcaller_id.nameCONTAINSbrad%255EORDERBYDESCnumber>
    with flocks on the work disk (a ZFS system shared among all of the
    Halls). These are suspiciously similar to the problems that Simon
    <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gluex-software/-3gmYyZCk6c>
    and Alex
    <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gluex-software/5ydjauELiN0>
    have reported. These seem to have surfaced recently. SciComp is
    working on it.
      o Mark brought up the idea, often raised by David Lawrence, of a
        compact SQLite CCDB database that only serves out a subset of
        run numbers. This would help because a common practice is to
        copy the SQLite file to a local disk and access it from there to
        avoid problems with network mounted file systems. It might be
        considerably smaller than the full database at 1 GB. Naomi
        suggested that a file that serves an entire run period would be
        most useful. There was interest in developing the idea, although
        Alex pointed out that the size of the full database it not all
        that huge.
  * Brad S. is planning a JLab Scientific Computing Workshop
    <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IBrxtxCe4Vd7jq2W69G9hYpdj1hPXX9eq3ZZ_QaW_n4/edit?usp=sharing>.


      Geometry update in CCDB to support TOF upgrade

Richard found some hard-wired geometry constants in the code for hdgeant 
and hdgeant4. The total number of counters was not in the HDDS XML 
description; they have been added now. Also a new attributed has been 
added to indicate whether a counter a channel reads out a single-ended 
or double-ended module. For hdgeant4, there is a hard exit if this 
"pairing" information is not there. The new scheme has been been tested 
on old and new run numbers and has been merged to the master branch.


      TOF II Reconstruction Anomaly

Sean showed plots of TOF monitoring histograms 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/images/b/b9/Sdobbs_HDGeant4_20191022.pdf> 
from 200 k bggen events using TOF II geometry and reconstruction. He 
sees a slope in the difference between the which-counter-was-hit 
position info from the TOF when compared to the track extrapolation 
position as a function of counter number.

[Added in press: this effect was tracked down to an incorrect time 
propagation constant being used for simulated TOF data. Sean found and 
fixed it.]


      Review of HDGeant4 Issues on GitHub

We skimmed headlines of the issues 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/HDGeant4/issues>.

  * Alex submitted an issue where HDG4 bombs when trying to propagate
    neutrons. The problem is not present in HDG3. Jon Zarling reports
    the same error.
  * Mark mentioned that when he showed the issues list at the Geant4
    Collaboration meeting that was held at JLab, one of the attendees
    mentioned that they had seen similar errors with G4VoxelNavigation.
    Mark will try to track him down and get the scoop.


      Items from the Software Help List

  * Alex brought our attention to a thread on the Software Help list
    <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gluex-software/pmAqif-NVZY>
    started by Peter Pauli. It appears that not all the versions needed
    to simulate 2018 data are available on the OSG. Mark et al. will try
    to straitened this out.
  * Alex asked about any progress on the b1pi test error in mcsmear that
    Mark posted on the list. As Sean pointed out in his response, it is
    likely that inconsistent versions of the geometry are being used.
    The test is still using hdgeant, so the geometry is compiled into
    the binary and reflects whatever is in the HDDS build.

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  * This page was last modified on 23 October 2019, at 15:30.

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