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HSF Weekly Meeting #140, 21 June, 2018

It’s the summer solstice meeting!

Present/Contributors: Graeme Stewart, Dario Menasce, Andrea Valassi, Benedikt Hegner, Tommaso Boccali, Eduardo Rodrigues, Jim Pivarski, Michel Jouvin, Pete Elmer, Daniel Elvira, Riccardo Maria Bianchi, Pere Mato

News, general matters

• WLCG management board meeting decided to remove the moribund Applications Area (AA). HSF will take on the role of reporting software at the WLCG-MB and the LHCC.
  • Graeme will by default take on that role for now.
• Old AA meetings stay, but now focused on SFT hosted software projects.

Activity updates

Licensing

• Need to follow-up with Belle II (task force meeting this week during their collaboration General Meeting) and Fastjet.

Training

• Currently busy putting out to arXiv the Training&Careers paper (now in GitHub). Almost there, will resume WG activity after publication (very soon, thanks to Graeme)

Packaging

• Had a meeting last week (minutes). Discussed more R&D proposals based on a deeper investigation of various approaches:
  • Build everything (Chris Burr and Ben Couturier, Nix)
  • Prefix based environments (Guilherme Amadio and Graeme, Portage)
  • Developer environment setup (Chris Green, SpackDev)
• Will have next meeting 4 July (sorry USA), to discuss CHEP talk
• SFT summer student has started, looking at using Spack to build the LCG stack.

Frameworks

• Agenda for the pre-CHEP workshop is in place. Please sign up.
  • We are investigating vidyo possibilities with CHEP organisers.

Visualization

• The code of Ed Moyse’s WebGL based browser code in now in GitHub. It has been used as the base for a community-driven web-based event display developed for the TrackML challenge. The event display will be further developed by the Visualization WG members.
• CWP paper is moving on: Ric merged post-Naples contributors’ additions; he also fixed, updated, and expanded the bibliography. Tom and Ric are editing the text for submission. Latest version on GitHub.

Software Development

• There was a Software Development Tools meeting last week (minutes).
  • Good turnout, ~25 people.
  • Extensive discussion on performance measurements, tools to do this and comparisons.
  • There is interest in working on a common warehousing and visualisation project.
• Next topics: static analysers, metric gathering tools.
  • Date not yet decided.

Software Forum

• Next meeting after CHEP will look at vectorisation and data layout libraries.
• Please suggest more topics!

Technical Notes

• Technical note on HSF Platform Naming Conventions is finished its consultation stage. To be finalised.
• Technical note on HSF Project Best Practices is now circulated more widely, please give feedback.

HSF/WLCG Workshop Follow-up

• New activity areas for critical areas:
  • We will set up working groups in analysis, reconstruction and simulation areas soon, follow up on CWP roadmap. Means to provide input to LHCC review.
  • Please think about names of good people to be involved.

PyHEP Workshop

• Registration closed since June 15th. 71 registrants.
• Sponsorships: Nikhef grant received in the account. The transfer from the Python Software Foundation has been confirmed. Together with the registration fees all expenses are covered.
• Pre-workshop questionnaire had been sent ~10 days ago. Very good response (43 participants replied so far).
• Other bits of admin being finalised. E.g. we now have our workshop secretaries assigned.
• In short, we are largely ready!

Generators Software Re-engineering Workshop

• Graeme and Andrea with a few people from MCnet. Generally positive response to call. Now working on a document to outline the workshop’s background, discussion areas and intended outcomes. (AndreaV: due to the ‘“too many Andrea’s” effect, was not aware of Graeme’s document so I also started drafted another document - never mind, should just merge them!)
  • Hope to define work programmes that can attract support to the critical areas of re-engineering and have long term attachments with the generator authors.
  • Want to have this before the LHCC review of HL-LHC plans.
    • Possible conflict with Madgraph tutorial in November - early December.

CWP

• General Matters and Roadmap

  • Accepted final signature on the paper. Need to update the arXiv version (hopefully the last time).
  • Michel is following up on re-submission from the “ed board” HSF address.

• Publication status for Individual WG Papers

  • Machine Learning
    • New content added. Now being reviewed and finalised.
  • Data Organisation, Management and Access
    • No news from Bo...
  • Data and Software Preservation
    • Stuck in Michel (J)’s todo list...
  • Visualization
    • See above.
  • Event/Data Processing Frameworks
    • Not quite final (but close) version now in HSF documents repository.
  • Careers, Staffing and Training
    • See above.
  • Conditions Access
    • Still a commitment, but no progress.

AOB

• IRIS-HEP proposal (a condensed version of the Strategic Plan that is in arXiv) has been submitted. They would like a letter of intention to collaborate that they can give to the NSF.
  • Draft of that is here.
  • We would like this meeting to agree to that.
  • There will be a steering board that meets quarterly, HSF will be represented.
  • “Mechanical” question - which live body or bodies actually sign?
    • OK for Graeme to sign, approved by this meeting.
  • No dissent on this letter - approved.
• SFT group had some concerns about the way ROOT maintenance was expressed in the submission. SFT believes that challenges are being addressed successfully over time. There is agreement to collaborate in the future.
• Website reorganisation underway: https://github.com/graeme-a-stewart/hsf.github.io/tree/website-reorganise.
  • Please take a look and add suggestions or updates (Google Doc collecting ideas is here).

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