[Halld-offline] Software Meeting Minutes for September 1, 2020

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

Please find the minutes here 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_September_1,_2020#Minutes> 
and below.

   -- Mark


    GlueX Software Meeting, September 1, 2020, Minutes

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

There is a recording of his meeting 
<https://bluejeans.com/s/jx7T2hAh4Zm/> on the BlueJeans site. Use your 
JLab credentials to authenticate.


      Announcements

 1. New release of Build Scripts: version 2.1
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-August/008300.html>.
    Introduces parallel building of xerces, lapack, and hdgeant4.
 2. version.xml files deleted from DIST
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-August/008302.html>.
    Long threatened, finally done.
 3. New version set: 4.25.0
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-August/008304.html>.
    Brings a new version of halld_sim that includes changes for
    simulating the hybrid FCAL and for the mc_gen event generator.
 4. New version sets to address slow hdgeant4 jobs
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-August/008308.html>.
    This change looks not to address the problem advertised, but neither
    does it do any harm.
 5. New version set: version_4.27.0.xml
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2020-August/008310.html>.
    Brings in a new version of JANA.
 6. Simon reports that the work disk is full. Please delete any unneeded
    files under /work/halld. Individual user usage can be found on this
    SciComp page <https://scicomp.jlab.org/scicomp/#/work>.
 7. Alex reported on a problem with large number of NIS lookups from
    DSelector jobs on the farm. The problem seems to be associated with
    CCDB access from the ROOT program used. This could be addressed in
    at least two ways:
     1. Writing a ROOT-based interface for PROOF Lite jobs so that each
        thread need not do a separate access to the CCDB.
     2. Have a way that the start of jobs could be automatically
        staggered in time so the initial demand for database access does
        not all come at once.


      Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting

We went over [[GlueX Software Meeting, August 18, 2020#Minutes|minutes 
from the meeting on August 18.

  * *Overleaf*. David reported that that Lab now has a limited number of
    licenses under the control of various administrative assistants
    around the Lab. If folks have a document that they want to have
    under the license, they should contact one of the license holders
    and the document can be registered. This is a temporary situation
    until the magnitude of the need is demonstrated. Naomi has given all
    of her documents to Rachel Harris. David said that he would talk to
    Brad Sawatzky to see if more instruction should be given the AAs to
    make their role more effective.
      o Susan mentioned that a group at Juelich had forked a free
        version of a predecessor of Overleaf, and stood up their own
        system. That might be an alternate path for us.
  * *Tests of Pull Request Builds*. Sean reported that tests for
    HDGeant4 pull requests have been implemented now.


      Report from the Last HDGeant4 Meeting

We went over the minutes from the meeting on August 25 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/HDGeant4_Meeting,_August_25,_2020#Minutes> 
without significant comment.


      New Project to Calibrate Drift Chambers with AI

David announced that he, Naomi, and Thomas were awarded a grant to use 
machine learning to regulate drift chamber gains constants 
automatically. The idea is that the system can be trained to adjust the 
high voltage on the chambers in response to the atmospheric pressure 
such that gains are kept constant. The funding lasts for three years. 
They will be hiring two postdocs to work on the project.


      Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List

Nilanga brought our attention to a post from Kevin Luckas 
<https://groups.google.com/g/gluex-software/c/ONrzx_Y7B8U> asking about 
doing kinematic fits to veto specific background reactions. In the 
thread Justin pointed out the work that Alex Barnes had done on this. 
Nilanga was getting crashes trying to use the code and is making an 
appeal to any experts out there for help in figuring out what is going 
wrong.


      Action Item Review

 1. Ask the Computer Center about staging the start of jobs in time.
 2. Make sure that the automatic tests of HDGeant4 pull requests have
    been fully implemented.

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  * This page was last modified on 4 September 2020, at 16:00.

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