February 2020 Offline Leads Meeting Notes

leads

The February 2020  LArSoft Offline Leads status update was handled via email and a google document. 

LArSoft – Erica Snider

At the behest of SCD management, we have investigated a non-Fermilab partner to take the lead in providing a new LArSoft event display (ED). This effort has not panned out, so we are again in the position of having no effort to put into solving the general ED problem. We are now working on next steps, and are considering a completely different strategy to leverage the three most prevalent non-LArSoft EDs to provide a solution a LArSoft/gallery environment.

Licensing and copyright was discussed at the January 28th LArSoft Coordination Meeting. The proposal  is to have one file per repository that says, “Copyright 2020 Fermilab for the benefit of the LArSoft collaborating experiments.’, and license all but larpandoracontent and larpandora under the Apache License v2. The larpandora package will be licensed under GPL v3, as is required by the Pandora SDK license.

The project is seeking feedback on the question of whether to continue weekly releases. Based on comments received so far, it appears that the experiments might be open to a less frequent integration release schedule. Offline leads should please advise. Some background:

  • The intent of weekly releases was to provide stability for people developing code. 
  • Because the dependency versioning is tightly coupled to the source code, however, experiments are forced to move their repositories forward as integration releases appear, which in turn typically forces developers to move their working releases forward. 
  • The weekly update therefore imposes a burden on developers, which at least partially obviates the hoped for stability frequent integration releases were intended to create.

There have been no significant issues reported related to the GitHub migration so far, only minor and easily fixed failures with workflow scripts. Some general guidance was requested for how to  collaborate on feature branches, which was provided at the Jan 28th LArSoft Coordination Meeting. We are now attempting to improve the usability of the system through improved tools. A first project in this direction is to provide users and L2 approvers a simple, visual way to assess the status of all pull requests within their projects, or that are otherwise of interest to a developer. The “project” view within GitHub, and OctoBox.com have been discussed as possible solutions. 

DUNE – Andrew John Norman, Heidi Schellman, Tingjun Yang, Michael Kirby

LArSoft released hep_hpc v0_12_01, which depends on hdf5 v1_10_5. The protodune analysis package/repository now depends on hep_hpc v0_12_01. 

Mike Wang implemented the tensorRT inference client in LArSoft/larreco, which allows larsoft job to evaluate convolutional neural networks on GPUs at a remote server. This has sped up significantly the inference of the networks in the ProtoDUNE reconstruction. 

Most of the scripts and code in the dune repositories have been modified to be python3 compatible. 

ICARUS – Daniele Gibin, Tracy Usher

Preparations for data taking continue, target date for turning on the High Voltage and seeing first field on data is approximately the beginning of May. The process for cooling and filling is underway now. 

Much focus has been on the initial stage which will translate from daq format to LArSoft format. In addition, the initial noise filtering – removing coherent noise – will be done followed by the 1D deconvolution and hit finding using the gaushit module. Effort of the past few months here has been focused on insuring all three steps are thread safe with the result that we have recently been able to demonstrate multi-threaded operation of this stage. We continue to refine this step. An issue is that the testing has been done today using feature branches of several LArSoft packages which are simply defining a few services as “SHARED” rather than “LEGACY”. As we approach real data taking it would be nice for these updates to be part of a LArSoft release so we can take advantage of multi-threaded operation. 

There will be strong need for an event display during the commissioning phase which is capable of displaying the full set of RawDigit data at full resolution. With 54,000 channels this is challenging for ICARUS,  the LArSoft event display is not capable of performing this task (in particular over a network connection). As such we have worked with Marco Del Tutto to update the event display originally authored by Corey Adams for MicroBooNE – now known as the TITUS event display. This is a combination of python (3) and C++ and is based on the PyQT5 interface. It works unbelievably well for displaying RawDigits at full resolution, in particular the zoom capability is excellent with no delay or redraw, etc. I personally highly recommend this as something that could be adopted by LArSoft. 

ICARUS needs to start facing up to logistic issues surrounding calibrations. In particular we need to be setting up several databases to handle calibration constants (e.g. preamplifier gains). The big issue is we have yet to identify a “database expert” on our side but also are not sure the process for interacting on the LArSoft side. 

LArIAT – Jonathan Asaadi

No Report

MicroBooNE – Herbert Greenlee, Tracy Usher

No Report

SBND – Roxanne Guenette, Andrzej Szelc

No Report

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