GlueX Offline Meeting, June 28, 2017

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GlueX Offline Software Meeting
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
11:00 am EDT
JLab: CEBAF Center F326/327

Agenda

  1. Announcements
    1. Nightly builds include hdgeant4 and gluex_root_analysis (Mark)
    2. HDPM 0.7.1 (Nathan)
    3. Status of HDvis, the GlueX 3-D Event Display (Thomas, Dmitry)
    4. Status of REST production 2017-01 ver01 batch01 (Alex)
    5. New Sim-Recon release, version 2.15.0 (Mark)
  2. Review of minutes from the last meeting (all)
  3. Progress on using the OSG (Richard)
  4. CCDB update (Dmitry)
  5. HDPM support (Nathan)
  6. Review of recent pull requests (all)
  7. Review of recent discussion on the GlueX Software Help List.
  8. Action Item Review

Communication Information

Remote Connection

Slides

Talks can be deposited in the directory /group/halld/www/halldweb/html/talks/2017 on the JLab CUE. This directory is accessible from the web at https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2017/ .

Minutes

Present:

  • CMU: Naomi Jarvis, Mike Staib
  • FIU: Mahmoud Kamel
  • Glasgow: Peter Pauli
  • JLab: Alexander Austregesilo, Thomas Britton, Brad Cannon, Hovanes Egiyan, Mark Ito (chair), David Lawrence, Dmitry Romanov, Elton Smith, Nathan Sparks, Simon Taylor, Beni Zihlmann
  • Yerevan: Hrach Marukyan

There is a recording of this meeting on the BlueJeans site. Use your JLab credentials to access it.

Announcements

  1. Nightly builds include hdgeant4 and gluex_root_analysis. See Mark's email.
  2. HDPM 0.7.1 released. See Nathan's email.
  3. Status of HDvis, the GlueX 3-D Event Display. Thomas and Dmitry demo'ed the latest version. Click here to view an event. The underlying technology has changed from ROOT to three.js and it now runs in the browser. They will give a fuller report at the next offline meeting.
  4. Status of REST production. Alex summarized progress. See the 2017-01 ver01 batch01 web page 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.
  5. New Sim-Recon release, version 2.15.0. See Mark's email announcement.

CCDB update

Dmitry gave us an update. See his slides for the details. 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.

A new tagged release of CCDB, with the cache feature available, will appear soon.

Progress on using the OSG

We skimmed Richard Jones's recent email 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.

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.

HDPM support

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.

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.