GlueX Software Meeting, November 24, 2020

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GlueX Software Meeting
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
3:00 pm EST
BlueJeans: 968 592 007

Agenda

  1. Announcements
    1. Build Scripts Releases 2.4 and 2.5
    2. New version set: version_4.32.0.xml
  2. Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting (all)
  3. Moving Forward to New Linux Distributions (Mark)
  4. Review of recent issues and pull requests:
    1. halld_recon
    2. halld_sim
    3. CCDB
    4. RCDB
    5. MCwrapper
  5. Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List (all)
  6. Action Item Review (all)

Minutes

Present: Alex Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Sergey Furletov, Mark Ito (chair), Igal Jaegle, Naomi Jarvis, Simon Taylor, Nilanga Wickramaarachchi, Beni Zihlmann

There is a recording of his meeting on the BlueJeans site. Use your JLab credentials to authenticate.

Announcements

  1. Build Scripts Releases 2.4 and 2.5. See the release notes (linked) for the changes. Beni reported a successful built on Ubuntu 20.
  2. New version set: version_4.32.0.xml. Released last night. First version set with changes for Python 2/3 compatibility described in Mark's talk below.

Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting

We went over the minutes from the meeting on November 10th.

  • The work disk is still very full. Mark is working on producing personalized reports for power users to identify possible areas for archival and/or deletion.
  • Thomas reported that pilot jobs from the OSG have landed at JLab, but they don't run. Edgar Fajardo and Wesley Moore are working on it.
  • Beni reported that halld_recon issue #462 TOF dE/dx written as all zeros in monitoring hists and ROOT trees since 2020-07-10 has been resolved.
  • Nilanga reported that halld_recon issue #464 Issue with code for chi square comparison of two trees has been resolved.
  • The Software Working Group sends its congratulations to Dmitry and Olga on the birth of their son.

Moving Forward to New Linux Distributions

Mark described work in two areas, Python 2/3 compatibility and Singularity container construction, that will enable us to upgrade supporting software packages (e.g., Geant4) and distribute a uniform Linux environment as well as exploit new features of C++ and Python. For details see his slides.

  • Python 2/3 compatibility: a new Python module, python-future, is used to allow single Python files to be used under both Python 2 and Python 3.
  • Singularity container construction: a new Git repository, hd_singularity, is available with recipes and a script to build containers that will run GlueX software.

Review of recent issues and pull requests

We went over the flurry of MCwrapper issues submitted by Naomi last week. Most of the time was spent on Issue #46 SubmitSim needs info on how to supply command line arguments for the generators. The discussion boiled down to where to draw the line between info that MCwrapper should provide and documentation generated by the authors of event generators.

On a side note, Naomi has pioneered the technique of writing a subdirectory specific README.md that could be used for documenting generators.

Stability of DSelector on batch farms

Alex posted notes on a solution to a problem that arises when running multiple proof sessions, for example in a set of batch farm jobs. Not all threads complete, or entire jobs may quit.

Action Items

  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)