HSF Weekly Meeting #146, 4 October, 2018
Present/Contributors: Graeme Stewart, Michel Jouvin, Liz
Sexton-Kennedy, Eduardo Rodrigues, Catarina Doglioni, Pere Mato, Jim
Amundson, Giulio Eulisse, Daniel Elvira, Helge Meinhard, Concezio Bozzi
(Lots of apologies this week from Michel, Andrea, Tommaso, David, Witek -
it’s a CMS Week and an ATLAS S&C Week!)
News, general matters
- European Committee for Future Accelerators
(ECFA) have launched a survey on
“Recognition of individuals in large collaborations”. Aimed at
younger researchers; very relevant that people working on software
share their experience and participate in the survey.
- IRIS-HEP announcement
list
was publicised, people are encouraged to sign-up.
- The hepix-techwatch-wg was launched and had its first
meeting last week. The aim
is to organise and formalise technology tracking in a wider group.
Sub-groups to be setup.
- Michel, Graeme and Torre are cross-over members with HSF hats.
- Helge: lots of people joined the list, but many are known to be
very busy already. So people who actually have sufficient time to do
real work should join.
- Software area does not need to be covered as this is an existing HSF
activity; likewise costs are already covered by the Costs and
Performance WG.
HSF/WLCG workshop
- Reminder, proposal is a workshop at JLab, 18-22 March 2019.
- Met Friday 28 September with Amber, OSG and WLCG reps.
- Logistics look good for JLab - main auditorium can take 280, 4 other
rooms available for parallel sessions (80, 60, 35, 25 people).
- Amber is investigating catering and event logistics.
- Now confirmed as the location for WLCG and HSF.
- Still awaiting final confirmation from OSG, although feeling is
positive.
- Then we need to start planning an agenda outline soon.
New Working Groups
- Draft mandate
document
- Quite a bit of activity and clarifications in the last couple of
days (thanks!).
- Due to absences this week we were asked to delay approval until next
week.
- Should we call for further nominations now or wait until next week?
Generators Software Computing Workshop
- Reminder: Indico agenda,
with registration.
- Timetable is being firmed up and speakers from experiments and
generator teams invited. (Will go into Indico when a critical mass
has been reached.)
- Looks like a small hackathon on Wednesday is viable.
- Next organisers’ meeting, Thursday 11 October
16h.
Activity updates
Licensing
- Matteo Cacciari replied for the FastJet team about another meeting.
Not sold on non-GPL license and would like some more concrete
information/requests from CERN and experiments.
- Discussing with ATLAS and CMS Computing Coordination how to move
forward.
- Why do they want GPL?
- In our opinion some confusion with acknowledgements.
- Want code to be contributed back (but LGPL would do that too).
- CERN’s position has evolved now to favour MIT (old recommendation was
more strongly GPL).
- It’s the combinations of licenses that are problematic, GPL is
difficult in that regard for non-GPL components,
- Giulio - but GPL is a well established license and ecosystem,
it’s still a viable solution.
- Industrial collaboration for new architectures is a big
motivational point (Nvidia in particular are very GPL
hostile).
Training
- Sudhir suggested an item on this next week.
Packaging
- Meeting yesterday covered
developments at FNAL to provide a prototype development
environment for experiments (SpackDev).
- Interesting discussion - learning how to add extra things to
Spack. In general our interactions with the LLNL developers
are very positive.
- Minutes are
here.
- Next meeting planned for 2 weeks
time, 17 October.
Software Development
- Giulio - would like to have a meeting on profiling tools. To be
followed up, perhaps in 2 weeks time?
Software Forum
- HEP.TrkX meeting last
week.
- From David: “the discussion went well - in total, they lasted
about one hour, and it seemed to me that this project made
some interesting progress since CHEP, so that helps keep the
discussion going. We only had a handful of people in the CERN
room, but quite a large number outside (I know there were
clashes in CMS with an ML meeting and in ATLAS with your
review (presumably a smaller group than any sort of ML
meeting…), but that’s to be expected. I realize that we
should consider recording these discussions if the speaker is
willing. Its apparently not hard to put recordings on youtube
(as one example) and then would be linkable to indico and the
HSF.”
- Liz - concurred that hearing the project progress was
interesting and showing the flexibility to change tack, as needed.
- Discussion of potential gains on modern hardware next
week.
PyHEP
CWP
-
General Matters and Roadmap
- CSBS review
comments
- Michel was too occupied to make progress on these yet (seems
everyone else was too).
-
Publication status for Individual WG Papers
- Software Trigger and Event Reconstruction
- PR to the documents repo was
accepted. Done
- Data Organisation, Management and Access
- Bo was having a biber/bbl issue uploading to arXiv - Graeme
suggested using either TeXLive 2016 (as used by arXiv) or
2017 (known to work).
- Data and Software Preservation
- Visualization
- Ric said a few last issues were addressed in the final
review by the community. Should be able to now submit to
arXiv.
- Event/Data Processing Frameworks
- Graeme discussed with Liz, Jim and Benedikt. Plan is to make
progress in the next week, it may be that only an abstract
is missing.
- Conditions Access
- Paul will review what’s there right now and Graeme will
proof it.
AOB
- HSF Logo in vector format - reminder of action on Benedikt.
- Calendar was moved from “Activities” to “Communication” on the web
site.
- There was a small forum discussion thread on
codemeta - this looks like a very
nice way to integrate important information about software
repositories into the repo itself. Used by CalTech (with Invenio)
and Zenodo.
- Dan Katz has been a driver behind this and it looks like it
would be well worth investigating and helping to promote.
- A future evolution of
http://hepsoftware.org/ could go
this way?