January 2021 Offline Leads Meeting Notes

Offline Leads Meeting – Jan. 14th

Tom Junk, Tingjun Yang, Erica Snider, Katherine Lato

LArSoft Update:

  • Spack Update: SciSoft, after getting art to work with Spack, is now focusing on LArSoft. Kyle is working on a draft of the migration plan. 
    • Tom has looked at a few examples, trying things. Did not seem to be “easier” than current ‘system. The hope is that it at least solves some of the technical issues with portability, etc, and is no worse an experience for users. 
    • Two phases for the transition. In the first phase, allow Spack to operate with the underlying UPS. The second will do away with UPS.
  • Tickets for “numerous” items from work plan discussion were mainly ICARUS and SBND, who weren’t at the meeting. Documentation for running in containers was a DUNE request. No one present had tried them, so no feedback on this.
  • Documentation in general. Who do we target? New people, or experts? Is it complete? LArSoft asked for guidance on what to focus on and missing pieces. Also help with identifying things that are out of date.
  • Mu Wei presented Algorithms for calculating number of ions and photons at the January 12th LArSoft Coordination meeting, which led to a proposal to drop support for the Separate algorithm (where number of electrons and photons are uncorrelated). Discussed with those present, who agreed dropping Separate is reasonable.

Round Robin, DUNE:

  • Tom asked about Github going to two-factor authorization in August. Pull request was awkward. User side documentation isn’t as obvious as the administrative, but Tom did find it on the web. Might be helpful to add some pointers in the LArSoft wiki to the correct documentation in GitHub
  • Tingun mentioned a computing tutorial they’re having next Friday that will be going through a lot of LArSoft wiki pages. LArSoft asked to let us know if things are out of date, or need updating prior to that.
  • DUNE has a plan to split dunetpc but have been waiting, first on Spack migration. Have since decided they don’t need to wait on that. Discussed some of the technicalities, such as needing to do the build themselves piece by piece or getting an FWBuild-like recipe. Biggest work is probably breaking up into pieces, which they can do at any time. Will keep LArSoft advised.
  • Tingjun asked about status on updating TensorFlow. Erica noted that as of mid-December, there was a Tensorflow v2.3 build available.  Will inquire about plans for migrating LArSoft, and see about expediting them. 

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