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HSF Weekly Meeting #168, 20 June, 2019

Present/Contributors: Graeme Stewart, Dario Menasce, Andrea Rizzi, Pere Mato, Anna Zaborowska, Stefan Roiser, Ben Morgan, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Gloria Corti, Andrea Valassi

Apologies: Agnieszka Dziurda, Heather Gray (ATLAS week), Michel Jouvin

News, general matters

• Report from Future Colliders Software Workshop, last week in Bologna:
  • Consensus was reached among all communities for future colliders to develop a Common Turnkey Software Stack (called from now Key4HEP), connecting and extending the individual packages to enable a complete data processing framework.
    1. Key4HEP should be easy to use (for librarians, developers, users), easy to set up, easy to deploy, easy to extend.
  • Discussed the main components and reached some agreement:
    1. Identified the EDM as an essential component. Agreed to develop one based on PODIO and inspired by LCIO.
    2. For the framework, it was agreed that the best candidate to date is the Gaudi framework as the starting point. LC community will continue to use Marlin for the time being.
  • Identified the names for the ‘facilitators’ team that will drive the development of Key4HEP.
• Efficient Scientific Computing School, Bertinoro, Italy, 21-26 October 2019
  • The aim of the ESC school is to offer the participants the opportunity to improve their computing competences, learning from qualified and experienced scientists how to best exploit modern hardware and software technologies in their daily scientific work.
  • There are a few slides attached to today’s agenda.
• 3rd School on Open Science Cloud, Bologna, Italy, 16-20 September 2019
  • The School is multi-disciplinary and targeted at postgraduate researchers including bachelor degree or equivalent in fields such as physics, statistics, computer science, computer vision, biology, medicine, engineering working at any research institute, with experience in data analysis, in computing or in related fields.
  • The 2019 school’s theme is “Intelligent Systems”. The programme is organized over two tracks:
    • Machine Learning Methods and Applications
    • Computing infrastructures
• Some ongoing IRIS-HEP meetings focused on analysis are of interest:
  • Analysis Systems Meetup: https://indico.cern.ch/event/822074/.
  • BluePrint meeting between the Scalable Systems Laboratory and Analysis Systems group: https://indico.cern.ch/event/820946/.

Google Summer of Code 2019

• First evaluation due next week.

Activity and Working Group Updates

Data Analysis

• Organizing the next topical meeting:
  • “Comp infrastructures for future data analysis”, July 22nd (announcement will be sent later today).
  • Discuss experience and ideas with different platforms (local clusters, powerful individual servers, distributed systems, cloud resources etc…).
  • Collect inputs for the pre-CHEP workshop.
  • Would like to collect input from analysts, in particular.

Detector Simulation

• HG: Held a topical meeting of the HSF simulation group last week: https://indico.cern.ch/event/816485/ and tools for the Detector Geometry Description. Approximately 20 people were connected (either in the room or on vidyo). We had three talks: VecGeom, Diagnostic Plots and DD4hep and a stimulating discussion. We have decided that we will hold our next topical meeting after the summer break – please feel free to contact us if you have suggestions for the topics.

Reconstruction and Software Triggers

• Next topical meeting on the week of July 14th
  • In combination with the real-time analysis workshop: https://indico.cern.ch/event/793125/.
  • Topic: persistent trigger objects, talks from LHCb/ATLAS/CMS/neutrino community (?).
• Other action items:
  • Follow up on code optimization meeting that we had two weeks ago (LHCb-centric, now involving ATLAS and CMS).

Software Tools

• Following up on next topics.

Training

• Discussion with ATLAS and ALICE started about having a Software Carpentries event at CERN in the autumn, A possible StarterKit training as well.

Event Generators

• Meeting next week. Several people were at the Les Houches workshop this/last week.

Packaging

• Next meeting planned for 10 July (https://indico.cern.ch/event/829817/).
  • Contact Ben and Graeme for any topics.
  • Summer student has started at CERN working in this area.

Frameworks

• Mandate: https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/workinggroups/frameworks.html.
• Search committee is Liz, Michel and Graeme.
• So far 10 nominations received, we are chasing up with nominees to check that they would be willing to do this.
• Once that is done, we’ll open up for comments from HSF in general (~2 weeks).

Workshops

Pre-CHEP (2-3 November)

• Document created to track decisions and progress.
• Will go into the next CHEP bulletin next week.
• Agenda stub: https://indico.cern.ch/event/805983/.

Next HSF/WLCG Workshop

• Mailing list setup for organising: wlcg-hsf-workshop-2020-organisation@cern.ch.
  • HSF organisers can rotate - who is interested in helping?
• Reminder of the formal call now for interest in hosting this event. Parameters are:
  • Facilities for 1 whole week, in May or June 2020
    • Monday morning -> Friday lunchtime
    • Note that the week of 1 June is not suitable (LHCC); weeks beginning 18 May and 22 June are disfavoured (Ascension holiday and ATLAS Week)
    • Other constraints on the date may arise, although we would endeavour to fix the date as soon as possible
  • 1 plenary room, capacity min 250
  • 2 additional parallel rooms, capacity min 100 each
  • Vidyo connection in these 3 rooms for the week
  • Optional breakout rooms ~3x30 people would be nice (vidyo there optional)
  • Low costs favoured (€200 ideal, €300 acceptable)
  • Lunch options to be specified - on site and included in registration favoured
  • One reception event on Monday, costs included; one dinner, could be billed separately if necessary
  • Some indications of typical local accommodation costs and travel options
  • A European location is favoured this time
• Please express interest by 12 July to wlcg-hsf-workshop-2020-organisation@cern.ch.

AOB

• Calendar:
  • It would be useful to start filling in the calendar for known events in 2020.
  • There is a suggestion from the CHEP Diversity Working Group that we also track the most important religious holidays, so as to avoid clashes with major meetings.
    • There are sites listing this, but it’s hard to know what’s most important regarding meeting schedules (by some metrics all days are religious holidays somewhere).
    • Generally we think this should be taken into account, but not clear how best to tackle the issue.
    • We didn’t like the idea of using the main HSF Calendar as this mixes two very different things.
    • Keep discussing with CHEP DWG.
• Mailing List:
  • There were 3 spam messages in the last week (non-HEP job postings). The user who sent them has been banned.
  • These are quite rare incidents, so we don’t plan to make joining the list an approved action. (One does have to be a list member to post.)
• AIDA++ Software Meeting was this week:
  • We have a number of EoIs in preparation.
  • Other EoIs are possible, but we do encourage coordination with the current software group via Frank and Witek.

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