May 2017 LArSoft Offline Leads Meeting Notes

This ‘meeting’ was handled via email and a google document. We heard from all but one experiment, SBND. If there are no objections, we may try this every other month. So we’ll meet in June, but do the google doc for July.

LArSoft – Erica Snider

  • The highest project work priorities are: LArSoft Workshop planning; continuation of association usability project work (which should be coming to a close soon); infrastructure and design adaptations for ProtoDUNE SP/DP and ICARUS; deployment of the new Spack-based build system; and re-factoring of LArG4. Other short term priorities can be found in the 2017 work plan document (May 2 update) here: https://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=14198 
  • As noted at the May 23 Coordination Meeting, details of the Spack / SpackDev based build system are not entirely finalized. In particular, details of the user interface are still open to changes based on feedback from beta testing and during presentations. We hope to have a deployment plan and schedule update at the next LArSoft Coordination Meeting. There will be a detailed discussion at the LArSoft Workshop. It seems likely that deployment will occur after the workshop.
  • LArSoft has been contacted by ArgonCube to discuss possible integration strategies for pixel readout LArTPCs.
  • ICARUS/MicroBooNE collaborators have re-written MicroBooNE signal processing classes to use art tools with a common abstract interface. This work is similar to that done by DUNE (David Adams) for ADC simulation and response functions. The project will help to coordinate these efforts in order to consolidate on a common set of interfaces to be used across all experiments for these processing steps. At that point, experiments will have the option of moving their now proprietary code into LArSoft to create a library of signal processing tools.
  • The LArSoft workshop will have both profiling and debugging tutorials based on user request.

DUNE – Thomas R Junk

  • We are focusing on getting ready for the ProtoDUNE run. The Track-shower CNN looks very promising but takes substantial CPU to run. Installation of TensorFlow is intended to help this issue.
  • We would like to thank Erica for giving the LArSoft tutorial at the DUNE collaboration meeting.
  • One thing which cropped up recently is how to handle different interaction time hypotheses for particles in an event. In ProtoDUNE, there can be four or more measurements of the time of an interaction, associated beam arrival time information, cosmic-ray counter hits, photon-detector hits, and a diffusion-based measurement. Some of these may have mis-associations and multiple candidate times reconstructed. This is probably just an analysis issue — what we want to do with these candidate times. The obvious thing is to use them to calibrate timing offsets in the detector, but there may be other uses, such as improving the reconstruction of particles broken in different volumes for other uses.
    • LArSoft response: “We should have a discussion at a LArSoft Coordination Meeting, or at a dedicated meeting to discuss strategies for handling this issue. It might be “just an analysis issue”, but to the extent that it potentially affects various position-dependent corrections, it might also need to be handled more rationally within the production reconstruction phases. Either way, it would be helpful to develop a consensus within the community as to how we will approach the problem.”

ICARUS – Daniele Gibin

  • The ICARUS spokesperson is Carlo Rubbia.

LArIAT – Brian J. Rebel

  • Brian has taken on the role of Technical Coordinator for the SBND and is stepping away from the LArSoft coordination. He will be available for consultations, but will no longer be able to contribute to any updates to the code or participate in the meetings.
  • Jonathan Asaadi will be fulfilling the role of Offline Lead for LArIAT.

MicroBooNE – Wesley Robert Ketchum

  • Gave overview of (previously) proposed restructuring of G4 simulation step at recent SBN analysis meeting, decoupling GEANT4 pieces with “propagation” pieces for ionized electrons. Feedback was that these were potentially very important changes, for both technical reasons (potential for reduction in memory footprint on grid, fewer rounds of simulation reprocessing, flexibility in combining different types of events) and physics reasons (ability to take energy depositions from neutrino interaction and translate them within one detector, or even from one detector to another to study systematics). Spoke today with Hans on where that stands and we are on same page with the other G4 restructuring work. Would be good to see all of this in place on the time scale of this summer for ICARUS large-scale processing and potentially MicroBooNE processing campaign: is that possible? 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.
    • LArSoft response: “The original schedule for this work was not met, and has not yet been updated. We will work with Hans to make that happen. Until then, we cannot comment on when the project will be completed, except to note that there has been steady progress on all of the underlying tasks. The project and schedule are being tracked in issue 14454.

SBND Roxanne Guenette, Andrzej Szelc

  • No report

Items from Offline Leads Meeting on 4/19/17 to follow-up on:

  1. DUNE wants something added to hit to store things for dual-phase. Robert Sulej is working on this with dual phase person. Additional hit parameters are used only in the event display. Having them inside hit would make code more simple. Having the parameters separated is reasonable as well since they are specific to dual phase. In the code branch we are developing there is a working solution to keep hit parameters in a separate collection, with no need for Assns.
    • 5/25/17 update – need to follow up to see if keeping the hit parameters in a separate colletion works.
  2. Presentation from student on CNN and adversarial network? According to Robert Sulej, it is possible to think of making such machine-learning-based filter for the detector/E-field response simulation, but it is a future work. They are working now on the idea rather to provide data-driven training set for the CNN model preparation. Need time to understand the results to tell what is the limitation of the tool and what isn’t.
    • 5/25/17 update – This has been on the schedule for a coordination meeting, and has been postponed at the request of the authors
  3. 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.

Please let us know if there are any corrections or comments to these meeting notes.

Katherine & Erica