[Halld-offline] Software Meeting Minutes, January 21, 2020

[Mark Ito]

Colleagues,

Please find the meeting minutes here 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_January_21,_2020#Minutes> 
and below.

   -- Mark


    GlueX Software Meeting, January 21, 2020, Minutes

Present:

  * *CMU *: Naomi Jarvis
  * *FSU *: Sean Dobbs
  * *JLab *: Alex Austregesilo, Mark Ito (chair), Igal Jaegle, David
    Lawrence, Keigo Mizutani, Justin Stevens, Simon Taylor
  * *ODU *: Nilanga Wickramaarachchi

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


      Announcements

Mark reminded us about the recent upgrade release for halld_sim and 
hdgeant4 (version_4.13.0.xml) 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-January/003873.html>, 
and the corresponding recon launch releases 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-January/003874.html>. 



      Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting

We went over the minutes from the meeting on January 7 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_January_7,_2020#Minutes>. 
As part of the deployment of the new Lustre-based disk space, we will be 
moving our volatile partition to a home on a new system and doubling its 
size, from 60 TB to 120 TB. Mark will send out an announcement on how 
this will work. The change is scheduled for February 4.


      Review of Minutes from the Last HDGeant4 Meeting

We went over the minutes from January 14 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/HDGeant4_Meeting,_January_14,_2020#Minutes>. 
Peter Pauli posted a study under Issue #93: Calorimeter timing mismatch 
between g3 and g4 <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/HDGeant4/issues/93>. 
He sees a significant difference in timing between G3 and G4 for the 
slow kaon in his reaction, not unlike that seen in other channels.


      Default CCDB server on farm: switch back to sqlite

Mark described the problem that led to the switch back to using SQLite 
files 
<https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-January/003866.html> 
for farm jobs. The root problem is when a couple thousand jobs start on 
the farm at the same time. The MySQL servers get CPU-bound and jobs have 
to wait on their constants (delays of an hour or so when things are 
bad). Under lesser loads, there is no problem. There are three paths 
being pursued to fix the problem:

 1. Marty Wise of the Computer Center has called a meeting for tomorrow
    to discuss adding more servers to hallddb-farm (a DNS alias for a
    combination of hallddb-a and hallddb-b.jlab.org).
 2. CCDB 2.0 has a new feature: creation of an intermediate table that
    does the join needed for calibration constant retrieval in advance.
    Dmitry Romanov and Mark are working on getting this version deployed.
 3. Mark has started looking at the idea David proposed some time ago of
    making a smaller database that services only a subset of run
    numbers. Mark succeeded in making a version of CCDB, valid for a
    single run, with an "assignments" table a factor of 20 smaller than
    nominal and about a quarter of the disk footprint. Performance
    improvements have not been measured. This effort is in its early stages.

We will likely settle on some combination of these approaches.

  * Alex pointed out that his launches use a
    only-used-for-launches-SQLite file and thus present no load to
    either the database servers or the SQLite mirrors on the work disk.
  * Justin noted that we could separate the load on the servers on a
    project-by-project basis: certain launches could use hallddb-farm
    while the individual user gets directed to the SQLite mirrors.


      Review of recent issues and pull requests

  * halld_sim Pull Request #111 Ijaegle primex
    <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/halld_sim/pull/111>. Sean expressed
    concern about a generator, built by default, that requires execution
    of shell scripts with non-generic paths and a gcc version greater or
    equal to 5.0. Igal explained that the non-default-ness would not
    hamper builds of the master branch, but may not give a usable
    product for amateurs.
  * *RCDB is_dirc_production queries*. These do not work at present on
    the website. Dmitry Romanov has been contacted via email.


      Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List

We reviewed the list 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gluex-software> without comment.


      Action Item Review

 1. Fix is_dirc_production on the RCDB webpage (Dmitry)
 2. Get Igal's PrimEx generator working on the farm. (Igal, Mark)
 3. Fix the database server so that CCDB access is not an issue (Mark et
    al.)
 4. Announce the move to a new volatile Lustre system (Mark)

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  * This page was last modified on 22 January 2020, at 19:08.

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