GlueX Software Meeting, September 15, 2020

GlueX Software Meeting
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
3:00 pm EDT
BlueJeans: 968 592 007

Agenda

1. Announcements
2. Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting (all)
3. Talk at OSG All-Hands Meeting (Mark)
4. PID matching suggestions based on data/MC comparisons (Sean)
5. Review of recent issues and pull requests:
   1. halld_recon
      • Issues
      • pull requests
   2. halld_sim
      • Issues
      • pull requests
   3. CCDB
      • Issues
      • pull requests
   4. RCDB
      • Issues
      • pull requests
6. Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List (all)
7. Action Item Review (all)

Minutes

Present: Shankar Adhikari, Alex Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Mark Dalton, Sean Dobbs, 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.

Review of Minutes from the Last Software Meeting

We went over the minutes from September 1.

• The space situation with the work disk is better now. There is about 10% (or 20 TB) free now. Thanks to those who helped in the clean up.
  • The work disk leader board in back in operation. Go there to see who is using the most space on the work disk.
• Alex's problem with a large number of NIS lookups in DSelector jobs has resolved itself. We are not sure why.

Talk at OSG All-Hands Meeting

Mark I. reviewed some of the points he made during his talk at the Open Science Grid All-Hands meeting a little over a week ago. The talk was meant to emphasize the relationship between the EIC and the OSG.

• Computing and software management each have at least two co-leaders, one of whom is from BNL and one of whom is from JLab.
• Computing hardware resources are also envisioned to be contributed from both of the labs.
• GlueX figures prominently in the list of OSG users from medium-sized collaborations.
• CLAS12 used about 5 million core hours during the month of July, comparable to GlueX usage for the entire year.

PID matching suggestions based on data/MC comparisons

Sean led us through the first slide (see below) of his talk on future areas for data vs. Monte Carlo comparisons. He will give a complete presentation at next week's HDGeant4 Meeting.

From the discussion:

• On widening TOF cuts as a function of momentum:
  • Simon reported that there is already a hook to do this in the PIDFOM system.
  • Alex reported that there is also a mechanism available for a momentum-dependent cut when doing particle identification in the Analysis Library.

Review of recent issues and pull requests

Thomas brought up a recent pull request to the halld_sim repository from Alex. This fixes a problem where simulation jobs can go into an infinite loop if the CCDB does not show any flux for a corresponding real data run. The change was made to the beam properties class.

New guidance for selecting version sets with MCwrapper

Sean described his new wiki page, How to choose software versions on the MC submission form. This led to discussion on related topics.

• Shankar asked for advice on how to specify the RCDB query to be used for a range of runs. Turns out that each run period has a different query and they are not called out on the form. This is because the "best" underlying query to the RCDB is different for each run period, thus different query aliases are needed for each instance. This needs better documentation.

Specifying Simulation Runs

Mark D. noted that when filling out the MCwrapper web form, it is hard to remember the "correct" responses, those that worked well in a previous project. Thomas pointed out a feature ("mod=2") where parameters from a previous project can be copied into a new form, with the exception of some fields that probably should not be re-used, such as the output file location.

Need for a New Version Set

Sean and Shankar pointed out that we are due for a new version set that incorporates recent improvements to several packages. Mark I. agreed to produce one.

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.
3. Create a new version set with the latest improvements. (Mark I.)