Offline Leads Meeting – 11/20/24

Present:  Steven Gardiner, V. Hewes, Tom Junk, Herb Greenlee, Erica Snider, Katherine Lato

Agenda:  discussed draft 2025 work plan

• Note effort issues:  Hans retired, SciSoft team working on DUNE event processing framework, Lynn, who retired several years ago, will leave once Spack is deployed.
• Changes from last year
  • Split item 1 into two to better differentiate the objectives, milestones, progress. Substance largely unchanged.
    • 1) Focus will be HPC + GPU. Expect Marc P to return to this work after Spack deployment
    • 2) Multi-threading and thread safety. Most of the work here that we had identified has concluded
  • Spack: expect this to conclude next CY. Hopefully early, but we will see
    • Added the next major milestones
      • Spack ready to deploy
      • Approval of transition plan
  • Enabling pixel detectors in LArSoft
    • Completed, so removed. Experiment(s) must now implement pixel readout geometry interface.
  • Event generator re-factoring
    • Same. Waiting for Spack. Added the next generators to be integrated in this way after GENIE
  • Infrastructure updates
    • Added refactoring hit-finding code to allow experiment-dependent handling of long pulses.
    • Also includes non-planar cathode geometries + TPC/cryostat dep drift velocities and electron lifetimes
    • Also have item to review case of jumpered and staggered readout wires within a single logical TPC, as is the case with SBND.
  • Documentation item largely unchanged
  • Consultation on larg4 transition still there, but believe most experiments are there??
  • Long-term priorities
    • Dropped a few items there: SBND data reduction strategies, common framework for data prep
    • Added participation in planning related to migration to new DUNE event processing framework, and consulting on development of pixel readout geometry

Discussion: 

The plan covers what people expected to see. It appears that once we have Spack, there are tools to make building code easier. Spack makes it easier to incorporate Python Packages, easier to have things in the same ecosystem. 

Is there a coordinated effort to standardize how experiments put their specific code bases on top of LArSoft and the art suite and how they build that code? Yes. Marc and his team are working toward a model with layered environments [and the CI system] that we hope the experiments will adopt. Part of the model will be:  keep your (experiment) code current; use our model as much as possible; keep CI tests up to date.

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