January 2018 Offline Leads meeting

The January Offline Leads ‘meeting’ was handled via email and a google document.

LArSoft – Erica Snider

1) LArSoft presented the plan for 2018 at the December 13th Steering Group meeting, going through the proposed short-term projects and long-term priorities.

  • There was a discussion about having the experiments provide service credit to their respective experiments for work in support of LArSoft community solutions. Experiments often find this difficult to do because they have other types of indirect work that is not currently counted as service credit. We discussed carefully matching the project to the experiment that most needs it so it could be counted.
  • Two items proposed by LArSoft will be added to the plan:
    • Re-architecture of art services in LArSoft to ensure thread safety
    • Support for transitioning code to art-independent repositories, making them available to run in external frameworks such as gallery.
  • The LArSoft Work Plan Wrapup for 2017 was also made available to the Steering Group.
  • There were no suggested changes proposed by the experiments, and the plan was approved by the two experiment representatives present (DUNE, MicroBooNE).

2) Event Display

 We are gathering requirements for an event display. Have requested feedback from the Offline leads on the draft.

3) Pixel detectors

 Erica is working with Alan Bross about having a 3D reconstruction workshop. The two primary goals of the workshop are to share ideas and on-going work on 3D pattern recognition algorithms, and to ensure that 3D pattern recognition code can be shared between experiments within LArSoft. Due to a number of key people who cannot attend the DUNE meeting, we decided to drop the idea of appending it to the end of the DUNE collaboration meeting at CERN. Will pursue alternatives that would simultaneously allow ALICE and LArSoft communities to attend. In the meantime, we will try to organize a video meeting in an attempt to develop an accord on coding standards. The purpose of those standards will be to establish a set of rules that will maintain the ability to merge coding efforts at a future time as the various stakeholders move ahead independently with code development.

4) A request from MicroBooNE was to be able to run LArSoft on NERSC. This seems to be coupled to item (7) in 2018 work plan, Architecture-dependent libraries. We have made note of it there.

5) LArSoft developers plan to meet with the art team in late January or early February to discuss the issue of selective loading of data based on geometric location, per a request from DUNE.

6) The LArSoft project is assessing how to respond to recent changes in the personnel available to work on LArSoft issues moving forward, particularly in the area of support for the ProtoDUNEs.

DUNE – Andrew John Norman, Heidi Schellman, Robert Sulej (ProtoDUNE)

DUNE is getting ready for ProtoDUNE running, building interfaces to reading raw data and preparing online monitoring and nearline monitoring payloads.  We are working on designing an event display that can be produced non-interactively in the nearline processing but displayed quickly, with buffers of precomputed event display images available for display over the web.  This allows for noise filtering and stuck code mitigation.

DUNE and ProtoDUNE management are assessing how to fill in the responsibilities that Robert Sulej and Dorota Stefan have carried so well for us these last few years.

ICARUS – Daniele Gibin

Progress has been made in the simulation of photons for the PMT system, also the CRT geometry has been finalized. Studies are ongoing in understanding the TPC charge resolution using the LArSoft simulation and reconstruction. ICARUS, partnering with SBND, has begun setting up the simulation and reconstruction production system (using POMS). Focus is now turning towards preparations for the upcoming SBN workshop in late March.

LArIAT – Jonathan Asaadi

No Report

MicroBooNE – Herbert Greenlee, Tracy Usher

Primary focus is on MCC 8 production which is progressing well.

Planning for MCC9 will start with a kick off meeting at MicroBooNE’s retreat the second full week of February.

SBND – Roxanne Guenette, Andrzej Szelc

No Report

Open issues:

  1. Restructuring of LArG4 – Hans Wenzel and William Seligman continue to work on this. https://cdcvs.fnal.gov/redmine/issues/14454
  2. Can NumPy and SciPy have standard, LArSoft compatible distributions made available?
  3. Selective loading of detector data. For DUNE FD want a functionality to load into memory data products only from selected part of the detector, e.g. selected TPCs; this may be a feature request to art however. Could be a usage pattern in LArSoft, or could be in art. Will set up a meeting.
  4. There was a question from DUNE about documentation for front-end interfaces to DB. Further discussion centered on access to beamline DB information, documenting how to access and populate conditions databases, etc., all of which are outside the scope of LArSoft. LArSoft documents guidelines that specify the structure of art services (or art tools) used to interface database information to detector-independent algorithm code, but does not specify how the data presented through that interface is obtained or collected. The LArSoft-facing interfaces need to be well documented as required by LArSoft coding guidelines. The LArSoft team can help provide guidance, but this isn’t an open issue for LArSoft.