August 2017 LArSoft Offline Leads Meeting Notes

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August 16, 2017  Offline Leads Meeting  

Attendance: Erica Snider, Katherine Lato, Wes Ketchum, Thomas Junk, Herb Greenlee, Robert Sulej

Round Robin – we went over the open issues (see end of notes), then went around the room.

LArSoft  – Erica Snider

  • DIscussed Geant4 work and how it has been rescoped. (see issue 2 below)
  • Don’t know the target for new build system. Isn’t on the critical path for any experiments at this time.
  • Floating Point Exceptions – agreed to fix these. They are almost always bugs and should be fixed. Often the first one fixed reveals more.
  • Documentation standard – please remind developers to follow them. Should ctskelgen also work for tools? (Feature request?)
  • Tensor Flow is high priority – had meetings on 8/16 and 8/17 to deal with issues involved.
  • Gianluca is leaving in September of 2018. Not much news on replacement except that a dedicated developer isn’t likely. Feedback from experiments — having a dedicated developer like Gianluca has been invaluable. Someone thinking fulltime about things has been useful for collaborators for things they aren’t familiar with, developing best practices, code maintenance, etc. Having a developer go through common code to ensure the code is done, and done better. ICARUS relied on a small group of experts who aren’t tasked with doing that, so having a developer who can do the technical work relieves the load on the experiment and collaboration. When the solution is useful for more than one experiment, it’s good to have that solution be professional. It would be useful to have a team of developers work on the needs of the collaboration.

DUNE – Thomas Junk

Dune TPC is getting big and the build is slow, not a LArSoft issue, but Tom mentioned it.

ICARUS – Daniele Gibin not available but Wes Ketchum reported.

Could use support in getting things going on the grid and build. Lynn has given guidance, including looking at other experiment’s. Note, Patrick might be able to help with this. And Vito.

LArIAT – Jonathan Asaadi

No Report

MicroBooNE – Herbert Greenlee, Wesley Robert Ketchum

 Working on getting openCV, LArCV as a UPS product. Don’t know if they need assistance from LArSoft since they’re working on integration.

ProtoDUNE – Robert Sulej

  • Just finished a meeting about Tensor Flow, that is high priority.
  • Interested in the material we already covered in this meeting, Geant 4. They met with Hans and he said he would try to develop a data product they could use in dual phase. It is also high priority for them. They need the data product before they need the rest of the factorization.

SBND – Andrzej Szelc

Report via email:

  • We finally got our basic geometry working. We have launched our first larger scale production using it (this is still single file .gdml, not the advanced version mentioned below) and will be debugging any problems that arise before we mount full scale production in next weeks.
  • In parallel, we are working toward testing that our optical simulation is working (also needed for full scale production).
  • Next month we should have validation results of tests + some idea of how that all works with large scale production.
  • We have had some first problems with running reco jobs – which might be due to disk space on grid nodes. We’re trying to understand what happened there.
  • Finally, we have identified a person that will take over geometry management, so might come back to the multiple file design.

Open issues from previous meetings:

  1. From 3/22/17 meeting: Since SBND has been trying to include files inside GDML, have run into problems. Gianluca has been helping debug this. New version of ROOT may be a solution.
    • 4/18/17 update: The version of root used by LArSoft has changed a few times over the last few weeks.  Andrzej Szelc said they haven’t looked into this because they were focusing on getting the basic geometry in. Once that is done, will look at this and hope the new ROOT version may have fixed it. So, no ticket has been written yet (to ROOT or LArSoft) about this as waiting on whether it is still an issue.
    • 5/25/17 update – still waiting.
    • 6/14/17 update – Once SBND gets the latest version of ROOT in, they’ll see if this fixes the issue.
    • 7/27/17 update – SBND is still finalizing the new Geometry idea – expert moving. Once this is done, we have a student starting up that could follow up on whether the bugs are gone in the newest version of ROOT. In the meantime Gianluca with Vito’s help is putting sbndcode in the continuous integration framework – this will be very useful.
    • 8/16/17 – have basic geometry working. Still debugging before mounting full scale production.

2. From May: Feedback at a recent SBN analysis meeting on proposed restructuring of G4 simulation step was that these were potentially very important changes. Is it possible to see all of this in place this summer for ICARUS large-scale processing and potentially MicroBooNE processing campaign?  Along with the work itself, how one updates/does the backtracking remains an unanswered question: not technically difficult, but could imply significant changes in downstream code based on how it is done. This may take another or a few more people working on it to really see it through.

    • The project and schedule are being tracked in issue 14454,   https://cdcvs.fnal.gov/redmine/issues/14454
    • 8/16/17 update – Up until June, thought could get it done by mid-summer. The original plan was to incrementally replace parts of the LArG4 code with the updated Geant4 functionality and interfaces. But it looks like it is easier to do a full replacement. Since we changed the scope, we’re awaiting a good estimate on completion.
      • A question about the design arose, which was whether the ionization and scintillation modeling is downstream of the energy deposition, or embedded in the Geant4 stepping. ICARUS (and presumably other experiments) would like to be able to run ionization and scintillation, and all other downstream simulation in a separate job from the energy deposition simulation. It is not clear whether this is possible if the ionization and scintillation is done by Geant4. We (LArSoft) believe this will be possible with the re-factored code, but should be verified with Hans.  Will set up a meeting with Hans, Wes and Erica when he’s back to clarify design details and get a reasonable end-date or if additional resources are needed.

3. From 6/14/17 meeting: MicroBooNE asked about how to give credit to authors, experiments and institutions for LArSoft code written.

  • 7/27/17 update
    1. Have updated the recommendation on documenting code at http://larsoft.org/important-concepts-in-larsoft/design/.
    2. We committed to presenting a proposed documentation template for header files at a LArSoft Coordination Meeting.  (This was done on 6/27/17).
    3. LArSoft has a place to give author credit for algorithms and services on larsoft.org – as well as in the code itself. This is not being done enough, so suggest a multi-prong education campaign to encourage people to sign their name on the code they write and to contribute to the http://larsoft.org/doc-algorithms/ page. This will be highlighted in a LArSoft Coordinate Meeting with follow up but this needs to be done by all experiments, not just LArSoft.
    4. Presented proposal at June 27 Coordination Meeting. The action items from that discussion
      1. Add institution and experiment to the template
      2. Publish the template on a web page
      3. What are the plans from the experiments to push this practice out to the code?
        1. Recommend adding template documentation whenever code is updated?
        2. Make it the policy of the experiments

8/10/17 – update – have institution and author in the template and published it at: https://cdcvs.fnal.gov/redmine/projects/larsoft/wiki/Code_documentation_requirements_and_guidelines

Need to provide an environment variable so that the template to ctskelgen points to a file with the above field. https://cdcvs.fnal.gov/redmine/issues/17426 – redmine issue for that work assigned to Erica.

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