[Halld-offline] Software Meeting Minutes, February 16, 2022

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

Please find the minutes here 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_February_16,_2022#Minutes> 
and below.

   -- Mark

      _________________________________


    GlueX Software Meeting Minutes for February 16, 2022

Present: Alex Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Sean Dobbs, Sergey Furletov, 
Mark Ito (chair), Richard Jones, David Lawrence, Curtis Meyer, Churamani 
Paudel, Simon Taylor

There is a recording of this meeting 
<https://jlab-org.zoomgov.com/rec/share/3F2LobRgURzg__3SZeObjqQstB0o4uGe9kwiaoG7pgZ_dnrK0abJrZ9wGSNoAnvf.i3Hz4BHsHS4FR6wR> 
on the ZoomGov site. Passcode: ey1uBqA#


      Announcements

 1. New release of Build Scripts: version 2.31
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2022-February/008760.html>

      * Building ROOT from the master branch of the GitHub repository is
        supported, but Mark has not been able to get a successful build.
 2. New version set: 5.4.0
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2022-February/008764.html>
    Update releases.
 3. New version set: recon-2019_11-ver01.2
    <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2022-February/008765.html>
    Includes a bug fix to the creation of ROOT output trees.


      Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting

We went over the minutes from the meeting on February 2 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Software_Meeting,_February_2,_2022#Minutes>. 


We had a discussion of several issues around transition to a new version 
of a Linux distribution.

  * Docker has taken down its auto-build feature for non-paying
    accounts. We have been using this to produce containers for the OSG
    and the HPC centers. Richard reported that the "docker push" command
    on a Dockerfile can be used to initiate a build on DockerHub. We
    should move to that.
      o Mark remarked that this change in our procedures provides an
        opportunity to move our Docker containers from the "markito3"
        account to the "JeffersonLab" account on DockerHub.
  * The CentOS account on DockerHub <https://hub.docker.com/_/centos/>
    does not provide a CentOS 8 stream container. However, it is being
    provided by a private citizen
    <https://hub.docker.com/r/tgagor/centos/tags>. Mark has not built a
    GlueX container from it yet.
  * Richard has a GlueX-ready CentOS 8 singularity container on CVMFS:
    /cvmfs/singularity.opensciencegrid.org/rjones30/gluexpro8:latest.
  * Mark is working on such a container that has all of the latest
    packages requires for the latest tags of our various packages.
      o The CentOS 8 Docker container has been deprecated such that it
        cannot be used to build a GlueX singularity container without
        hand modification.
      o Downloads of CentOS 8 RPM packages from the deprecated site are
        extremely slow.
  * Curtis is running CentOS 8 Stream on the cluster at CMU, an
    existence proof.
  * Richard is interested in a CentOS 8 container to debug issues
    reported by Naomi on CentOS 8 Stream.

Richard has addressed hdgeant4 issue #204 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/HDGeant4/issues/204> by going to the 
CCDB to get info for beam parameters if a BEAM card in not present in 
the control.in. See HDGeant4 pull request #208 
<https://github.com/JeffersonLab/HDGeant4/pull/208> and halld_sim pull 
request #233 <https://github.com/JeffersonLab/halld_sim/pull/233>.


      Report from the SciComp Meeting

Mark presented the slides that Bryan Hess showed 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2022/sciops+enp-bhess-feb22.pdf> at the 
SciComp meeting on February 3rd. Present at that meeting besides Bryan 
and Mark were Amitoj Singh, Brad Sawatzky, David Lawrence, Markus 
Diefenthaler, Ole Hansen, Thomas Britton, and Nathan Baltzell. Please 
see Bryan's slides for details. Some related points:

  * At the SciComp meeting, Mark did mentioned the idea of JLab
    providing StashCache space in addition to that already deployed from
    UConn as well as space-to-come from CMU. As noted in Bryan's slides,
    other than the disk space itself, JLab has all of the infrastructure
    needed to support StashCache up and running. At the meeting Bryan
    remarked that this is do-able without a lot of effort and promised
    to look into it.
  * Bryan has already agreed to come to our next meeting (March 2) to
    discuss status and plans for these OSG-related, outward facing (from
    a JLab perspective) systems.


      FAQ of the Fortnight: What do I have be careful of when creating
      ROOT histograms and trees with JANA?

This FAQ 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_FAQ#What_do_I_have_be_careful_of_when_creating_ROOT_histograms_and_trees_with_JANA.3F> 
simply points to this wiki page 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Locking_in_JANA> which Sean 
had referenced during a recent Open Analysis Discussion 
<https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki-private/index.php/January_25,_2022,_Open_Analysis_Discussion>. 
It is a golden oldie, from 2016, and provides guidance on how to handle 
ROOT histograms and trees in the multi-threaded environment of JANA.

There was some discussion:

  * Related to the burden on users of managing locks for ROOT, David
    reported that JANA 2 is very close to a release. He will ping Nathan
    Brei on where we are.
  * David remarked that we probably should embark on a program to keep
    our software up-to-date with the latest versions of C++. In general
    we are C++11 compatible, but the world is already using C++20 as the
    standard (not to mention C++14 and C++17).
  * Mark remarked that although different from the C++ situation, we do
    have a situation with Python 2 vs. Python 3. This issue has come up
    over and over during the past few years and solutions have thus far
    been of the Band-Aid (TM) type. Sean mentioned the current situation
    with RCDB 0.07.00 as an example, one that needs to be addressed
    sooner rather than later.


      Review of recent issues and pull requests

Sean called our attention to [halld_recon pull request #627] *Explicitly 
check to see if we're at the end of the file, and return the proper 
status*. It gets around a problem where the EVIO footer does not get 
written out. The root cause needs to be investigated, but this 
eliminates the hangs.

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  * This page was last modified on 16 February 2022, at 20:09.
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