November 2020 Offline Leads Meeting Notes

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November Offline Leads Meeting, November 10, 2020.

Attendees: Tracy Usher, Wes Ketchum, Tingjun Yang, Herb Greenlee, Tom Junk, Joseph Zennamo, Erica Snider, Katherine Lato

Discussed the status of the 2021 LArSoft work plan after the series of meetings with each experiment. Some of the items now in the short term priority list were in the 2020 work plan as long term items, so part of the new plan is a reshuffling of priorities. A few items mentioned in the meetings are more appropriately handled as tickets, so will open those, get them assigned, and track the work. There were also requests for consultation, which we may also track via tickets or as a work item in the plan.

Question from Wes about Spack: What about packaging the number of things experiments need, but that are not part of LArSoft? 

Erica: Note, a lot of the products that we care about have already been packaged in Spack. One of the benefits of migrating. We envision that all the changes to LArSoft and experiment code would be made in advance of the  migration to Spack, in a fashion similar to other migrations we have done. That doesn’t include things outside LArSoft that experiments depend on, say for analysis, and we’ve so far not considered this issue. We’ll discuss the transition process in more detail once we get the new build system. There will be time to address those types of concerns at that time.

Wes: I assume the priority is high for LArSoft?

Yes.

Wes: This is more for Tom & Tingjun. I’m aware of efforts on HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format) and wanting to write to HDF5 files from the DAQ. Not super immediate, but it might come up on the timescale of protoDUNE 2, which isn’t that far away. This may have impact on thinking about data formats and common analysis tools. NOvA did a fair bit of work to convert to HDF5. Is that something that needs to fit in the work plan somewhere? At a minimum doing data format conversation, or support for underlying things?

Tom: Kurt has supplied a basic data converter. Can’t read small parts of events, but that could be re-architected, so not a huge problem. There are generally more features in ROOT for reading files than for HDF5, including being able to make plots by clicking on a variable, etc. Also a lot of meta-data and headers we need to survive are missing in Kurt’s solution. It is a reinvention of the stuff we have in ROOT, but it’s a more modern solution to use HDF5.

Wes: We can talk about the end analysis part, but not sure if it’s needed.

Tingjun: Pandora needs planning meetings to incorporate machine learning. What’s the long-term plan for that?

Erica: That’s been on our list for some time. It came up in our meetings with the experiments. What’s been lacking is a clear project objective. Wasn’t much in general we could do except agree on an image format starting from wires or hits. There have been requests to include TensorFlow and PyTorch. Those can handled as tickets. Beyond this, it is unclear what is needed in terms of LArSoft infrastructure to better support machine learning. [Input on this is welcome.]

Still need to talk to people to turn some of the items in the plan into a detailed task list, which is true every year. Expect us to contact you for input to this part of the process.

Round robin:

  • SBN, Wes: 
    • In the process of getting production. It’s running now, and preparing for a much larger production in the new year. Some of the things we talked about (LArG4) are targeted for that. Want to close the loop in the next month. 
  • ICARUS, Tracy: 
    • The list you have is pretty complete. We’re just busy trying to get ourselves going. Multiple meetings within a few weeks of each other are taxing our resources.
  • DUNE, Tom: 
    • About pixels and the near detector. The software is already disjoint, with the near detector working in their own environment. That may be good because they’re in a hurry. At some point, they’ll need to be integrated.What’s in the plan is a good list.
  • ArgoNeuT, Tingjun: 
    • Several analyses still going on, and we appreciate the continuing support from the LArSoft team.
  • MicroBooNE, Herb: 
    • Nothing much to add. I heard you mention the things that I mentioned before.

Please email Katherine Lato or Erica Snider for any corrections or additions to these notes.