GlueX Software Meeting, September 1, 2020

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GlueX Software Meeting
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
3:00 pm EDT
BlueJeans: 968 592 007

Agenda

  1. Announcements
    1. New release of Build Scripts: version 2.1
    2. version.xml files deleted from DIST
    3. New version set: 4.25.0
    4. New version sets to address slow hdgeant4 jobs
    5. New version set: version_4.27.0.xml
  2. Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting (all)
  3. Report from the Last HDGeant4 Meeting (all)
  4. Review of recent issues and pull requests:
    1. halld_recon
    2. halld_sim
    3. CCDB
    4. RCDB
  5. Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List (all)
  6. Action Item Review (all)

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 on the BlueJeans site. Use your JLab credentials to authenticate.

Announcements

  1. New release of Build Scripts: version 2.1. Introduces parallel building of xerces, lapack, and hdgeant4.
  2. version.xml files deleted from DIST. Long threatened, finally done.
  3. New version set: 4.25.0. 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. 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. 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.
  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 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.
    • 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 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 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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