[Halld-offline] Software Meeting Minutes, October 13, 2020

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

Please find the minutes here 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_October_13,_2020#Minutes> 
and below.

   -- Mark

___________________________________


    GlueX Software Meeting, October 13, 2020, Minutes

Present: Alex Austregesilo, Nathan Brei, Thomas Britton, Sean Dobbs, 
Mark Ito (chair), Igal Jaegle, Naomi Jarvis, David Lawrence, Susan 
Schadmand, Simon Taylor, Beni Zihlmann

There is a recording of his meeting 
<https://bluejeans.com/s/ZUsLOOdYa74/> on the BlueJeans site. Use your 
JLab credentials to authenticate.


      Announcements

  * Alex called our attention to the recently announced upgrade of the
    Tape Library and the associated down time, scheduled for November
    2-4. See Bryan Hess's message to the SciComp Briefs mailing list
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/jlab-scicomp-briefs/2020q4/000819.html>.
  * Sean pointed out that we did not have a plan for the
    software/analysis talk on Saturday morning of next week's
    Collaboration Meeting, so we made one. Alex will give an update on
    processing. Mark may contribute a slide or two on software issues.


      Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting

We went over the minutes from September 29 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_September_29,_2020#Minutes> 
without significant comment.


      Recent Workshops

We discussed two workshops, sponsored in part by the Lab, held in recent 
weeks.

 1. Joint GlueX-EIC-PANDA Machine Learning
    <https://indico.gsi.de/event/10576/>
      * David was one of the organizers and he reported that the
        workshop was generally well received and another one is planned
        for next year.
      * Richard had good things to say about the ML for beginners
        sessions given by Thomas Stibor.
      * Naomi lamented the lack of time, both during and after the
        workshop, to work through the practical exercises provided.
 2. Future Trends in Nuclear Physics Computing
    <https://indico.bnl.gov/event/9023/>
      * Thomas commented that some of the topics (shared software,
        career paths for scientists working on software) are becoming a
        common feature of many workshops.
      * Mark mentioned (as he did last week) Rucio
        <https://rucio.cern.ch/> as a product that has promise for use
        by GlueX. It does scientific data management, that is, a system
        for keeping track of files and their various instances across
        multiple storage sites.


      HDF5 Support for HDDM

Richard gave a presentation on work he has been doing with using HDF5 as 
the underlying I/O system and associated record format for HDDM. Please 
see [his slides 
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DvXUrgsvzUCSa8cRON4G_QeX9hsiySqnrYrEGmgnfW0/edit?usp=sharing> 
for the details. His slide titles:

  * What is HDF5?
  * How does HDF5 relate to HDDM?
  * How does HDF5 support get included?
  * How does HDF5 support get built?

I/O using HDF5 will likely be better optimized than the code used by 
HDDM currently. It also provides a mechanism for random access. The C++ 
interface is done and Richard is working on Python support.


      Port of halld_recon to JANA 2

Nathan gave us an update. All of the JEventSources have been completed 
and he is on the plugins and then to testing.


      Unit Testing

Mark raised the issue of trying to incorporate unit testing into our 
software stack. Here the first problem is to define what we mean by unit 
testing. Nathan was in favor of implementing some sort of system and has 
thought about the issue a bit. Although he thinks that it would be a 
great thing to have, he is worried about a particular feature of our 
code: configurable operation of software components. For each 
configuration or option for a factory, for example, different testing 
code may be called for, at least in detail, and as data is passed from 
stage to stage, the number of configuration combinations may make for a 
large number of cases to test. We need to think about and discuss the 
problem further.


      Action Items

Copied from the last meeting:

 1. Ask the Computer Center about staging the start of jobs in time. (Mark)
 2. Make sure that the automatic tests of HDGeant4 pull requests have
    been fully implemented. (Mark, Sean)
 3. Finish conversion of halld_recon to use JANA2. (Nathan)
 4. Ping Dmitry on CCDB Issue #68. (Mark)
 5. Remind folks about their problematic cache files. (Alex)
 6. Finish CentOS 8 compatibility project. (Mark)


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