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HSF Weekly Meeting #142, 19 July, 2018

Present/Contributors: Graeme Stewart, Andrea Valassi, Dario Menasce, Benedikt Hegner, Eduardo Rodrigues

News, general matters

• Graeme gave an update on HSF activities in the GDB.

CHEP Matters

PyHEP

• General comments:
  • 70 people attended, providing excellent representation from most LHC experiments, Belle II and smaller experiments. Also lots of IT/lab representation.
  • Workshop ran very smoothly - thank you to the CHEP chairs and LOC help.
  • So far only received very positive feedback from participants.
  • Pre-workshop questionnaire was very useful and interesting. 70% of participants filled it in - really appreciated.
• Key take-away topics:
  • (More details in our close-out presentation.)
  • Python strong in HEP data analysis, and usage likely to grow further.
  • Binding Python to other languages is important and the future of cppyy from the ROOT team sounds excellent.
  • Robust distribution of Python ( several versions, so at least 2.7 and 3.x) is a non-trivial problem that needs attention.
  • Education and training: lots of discussion and topic seen as very important. Welcome the build of a community and training material such as the StarterKit material.
  • Migration to Python 3. Far easier for analysts than for experiments code for example. Still, a large fraction of the community already uses Python 3, hence support is not to be underestimated.
  • Core software is also using Python a fair bit.
• Outcomes and future
  • General feedback that workshop series should continue.
  • Consensus on need to build a community of interested users and developers.
    • A Gitter channel has been set-up and will soon be advertised.
  • Need to link with HSF efforts on training and education - repository of expertise in in Python in HEP is welcome, for example an inventory of appropriate tools.
    • We already got the StarterKit material moved out of LHCb onto an HSF training repository, as an action forward.
  • We will very likely prepare a short post-workshop survey, to help directing the future steps.
  • We started discussing the future of PyHEP among organisers. We will bring in 2 extra persons: one from the IF/neutrino community, another from an astroparticle physics experiment, to have good coverage across the broad community.

Activity updates

Training

• GridKa School of Computing asked to use again the WikiToLearn platform to publish their training material of this year’s lessons. People in charge of WTL kindly provided the necessary hook.

Software Forum

• Met yesterday, 18 July, discussed VecCore and SOAContainer (minutes).
• Meetings for after summer now being planned - please suggest and volunteer subjects to cover. Check Indico for booked slots.

Technical Notes

• Graeme sent an email with the status of HSF Platform Naming Conventions and HSF Project Best Practices (for the latter, feedback before 31/7/2018).

Generators Software Re-engineering Workshop

• Andrea: had a chat with Michelangelo Mangano before CHEP together with Witek and Graeme. Following his suggestions and some discussions, we now aim for:
  • A “bootstrap” workshop of 2-3 days, possibly before the LHCC review (which according to Graeme is now scheduled around March 2019).
  • Possibly, a later one-week workshop to do some real work with the experts.
  • For both events, Michelangelo suggested that the LPCC (LHC Physics Centre at CERN) could host them at CERN and possibly provide some support. Indeed CERN seems easier logistically for an event on a short timescale.
  • Graeme sent to Michelangelo the current draft document so that he can discuss this with colleagues and suggest a list of participants.

CWP

• General Matters and Roadmap

  • HSF Editorial Board got its ORCID rejected

• Publication status for Individual WG Papers

  • Graeme updated https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/organization/cwp.html
  • Machine Learning
    • Published: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02876
      • Minor update planned
  • Software Trigger and Event Reconstruction
    • Still needs to go to HSF repo
  • Careers, Staffing and Training
    • Published: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02875
      • Minor update to author list to come

AOB

• HSF Logo in vector format - reminder of action on Benedikt.
• Next HSF/WLCG workshop
  • We started discussing when and where to have the next workshop. Boundary conditions are:
    • There will be a pre-CHEP workshop next year (2-3 November 2019).
    • LHCC review of HL-LHC software and computing next Spring (exact dates and topics to be decided by LHCC in due course). Would like to use this workshop to prepare.
  • Thus end of January, beginning February looks ideal. However…
    • Belle II Week + Review is 4-13 Feb.
    • w/b 18 Feb is school holiday (FR + CH).
  • General support for going to US, East Coast is a bit easier and cheaper (than the US West coast), but weather could be a problem.
    • GDB yesterday argued we should have a European option as well (maybe cheaper overall? especially given an expensive CHEP next year).
  • We have a fairly firm offer from JLab to host. Offer from BNL/NY being prepared.
• Graeme will give a talk at ECFA tomorrow (https://indico.cern.ch/event/730568/)
  • Andrea: saw that there is a session on “individual recognition” just after Graeme’s talk. Unless I misunderstand, this would be a useful place to raise the issues of software careers and citation, and generally recognition of software/computing work by individuals.

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