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<p>Please find the minutes below and at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_June_28,_2017#Minutes">https://halldweb.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_June_28,_2017#Minutes</a>
.</p>
<p>__________________________</p>
<div id="mw-content-text" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr" lang="en">
<h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Minutes">Minutes</span></h2>
<p>Present:
</p>
<ul>
<li> <b>CMU</b>: Naomi Jarvis, Mike Staib</li>
<li> <b>FIU</b>: Mahmoud Kamel</li>
<li> <b>Glasgow</b>: Peter Pauli</li>
<li> <b>JLab</b>: Alexander Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Brad
Cannon, Hovanes Egiyan, Mark Ito (chair), David Lawrence,
Dmitry Romanov, Elton Smith, Nathan Sparks, Simon Taylor, Beni
Zihlmann</li>
<li> <b>Yerevan</b>: Hrach Marukyan</li>
</ul>
<p>There is a <a rel="nofollow" class="external text"
href="https://bluejeans.com/s/ex7@/">recording of this meeting</a>
on the BlueJeans site. Use your JLab credentials to access it.
</p>
<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="Announcements">Announcements</span></h3>
<ol>
<li> <b>Nightly builds include hdgeant4 and
gluex_root_analysis.</b> See <a rel="nofollow"
class="external text"
href="https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-June/002826.html">Mark's
email</a>.</li>
<li> <b>HDPM 0.7.1 released.</b> See <a rel="nofollow"
class="external text"
href="https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-June/002828.html">Nathan's
email</a>.</li>
<li> <b>Status of HDvis, the GlueX 3-D Event Display.</b>
Thomas and Dmitry demo'ed the latest version. Click <a
rel="nofollow" class="external text"
href="https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2017/HDvis/js/event.html">here</a>
to view an event. The underlying technology has changed from
ROOT to <a rel="nofollow" class="external text"
href="https://threejs.org/">three.js</a> and it now runs in
the browser. They will give a fuller report at the next
offline meeting.</li>
<li> <b>Status of REST production</b>. Alex summarized
progress. See <a rel="nofollow" class="external text"
href="https://halldweb.jlab.org/data_monitoring/recon/summary_swif_output_recon_2017-01_ver01_batch01.html">the
2017-01 ver01 batch01 web page</a> for details. Twenty three
thousand jobs have run or 75% of the first half of the Spring
2017 run. The efficiency of use of the farm nodes has had some
mysteries from time to time. We should have been able to go
twice as fast.</li>
<li> <b>New Sim-Recon release, version 2.15.0</b>. See <a
rel="nofollow" class="external text"
href="https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-June/002835.html">Mark's
email announcement</a>.</li>
</ol>
<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="CCDB_update">CCDB update</span></h3>
<p>Dmitry gave us an update. See <a rel="nofollow"
class="external text"
href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1I4HwOJvdjp5HgRyDrGdSxHKOUsw8QfE-mGETosQI16Q/edit?usp=sharing">his
slides for the details</a>. In summary, in response to reports
of extremely slow start-up times for DANA-based jobs (~10
minutes), he has implemented a memory caching system for CCDB.
The long delays were coming from multi-threaded jobs that access
SQLite versions of the database. Each thread needs to access the
database for its constants and in addition, some systems are
accessing the database multiple times, each time retrieving the
same data. He has measured an improvement of a factor of 35 in
the CCDB-related start-up time for 36 threads in a fully loaded
DANA program.
</p>
<p>A new tagged release of CCDB, with the cache feature available,
will appear soon.
</p>
<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="Progress_on_using_the_OSG">Progress
on using the OSG</span></h3>
<p>We skimmed Richard Jones's <a rel="nofollow" class="external
text"
href="https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/2017-June/002827.html">recent
email</a> on running GlueX software on the OSG. Folks are
encouraged to try it out. The first step is to get a certificate
for the Gluex VO from the OSG.
</p>
<p>In this context David reported that as part of his preparations
for the upcoming S&T review, Graham Heyes (and others) have
noticed that our demand on the farm for simulation is almost an
order of magnitude less than projections we have made in the
past. Part of this is focus on asymmetries, which do not need
large samples of Monte Carlo, another part is continued work in
understanding detector response and modeling it faithfully in
the simulation. There are already physics analyses underway that
could benefit from high-quality simulated data; it is not as if
there is no structural demand.
</p>
<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="HDPM_support">HDPM support</span></h3>
<p>Nathan gave an assessment on HDPM support. He will no longer be
able to support the package going forward. Recall that it
provides pre-built binaries for several distributions with a
relatively simple command-line interface. Several collaborators
are using it to support their development work. To create the
binaries, Nathan has been using Docker containers to emulate the
systems on the various target Linux distributions. There is
documentation to maintain, occasional bugs that need fixing and
computing-environment-changes/feature-requests/new-packages that
need to be supported.
</p>
<p>The support issue comes down to finding a volunteer to take
over for Nathan. David pointed out that the support task is a
good, finite-effort collaboration service task. He agreed to
bring up the issue with the collaboration board.
</p>
</div>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Mark Ito, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:marki@jlab.org">marki@jlab.org</a>, (757)269-5295
</pre>
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