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HSF Weekly Meeting #171, 12 September, 2019

Present/Contributors: Graeme Stewart, Serhan Mete, Concezio Bozzi, Witek Pokorski, Stefan Roiser, Eduardo Rodrigues, Caterina Doglioni, Michel Jouvin, Agnieszka Dziurda, Andrea Valassi, Daniel Elvira

Apologies: Pere Mato

News, general matters

• LHCC Referees Presentation summarising software matters was given on Tuesday:
  • https://indico.cern.ch/event/754734/.
  • Questions from referees about C++ training (is it too late?).
  • Closed session quickly touched on “modern” languages. Need for C++ training was stressed again, as performance is critical to us.
• EP R&D on Experimental Technologies:
  • This R&D activity has been funded by CERN, including a software work package
  • Four projects will be supported:
    • Turnkey Software Stacks (optimised and integrated stack aimed at detector developments).
    • Reconstruction at High Pileup (trackers and high granularity calorimeters).
    • Faster Simulation (machine learning algorithms for speed-up).
    • Analysis Facilities (new ROOT RDataFrame and object store integration).
  • This work will ramp up in 2020 and will run until at least 2024.
  • If you are aware of people who might like to work on these projects, as CERN Fellows, please let Graeme know.

Google Summer of Code 2019

• It’s done! 29 out of 33 students successfully completed their projects.
• Well done to mentors, students and, most of all, our coordinators: Javier, Andre and Antoine.

Activity and Working Group Updates

Detector Simulation

• Not a lot of news yet - starting to think about topical meetings for the next few months.

Reconstruction and Software Triggers

• Last week 2nd session with cross-talks:
  • https://indico.cern.ch/event/835790/.
  • Speakers from LHCb and ALICE.
  • Nice and fruitful discussion.
• Next meetings planned for October.

Software Tools

• We’re going to have a seminar on Tuning and Analysis Utilities (TAU) from Sameer Shende (Director of the Performance Research Lab, NIC, University of Oregon) on Monday October 14th at 5pm CERN time:
  • Agenda: https://indico.cern.ch/event/845622/ .
  • Room: 40/S2-D01
    • Salle Dirac.
  • The idea is to have an installation of TAU on CVMFS so that people can play with conveniently. How best to do this?
  • Depending on the feedback, can have a hands-on tutorial when Sameer is in Europe (December or later).
• Serhan and Graeme will discuss with Jakob the /cvmfs/hsf.org setup to install the software.

PyHEP

• First topical WG meeting on fitting tools took place yesterday, see agenda https://indico.cern.ch/event/834210/.
  • Good discussions at the meeting and continuing in the Gitter channel.
  • A second meeting will probably happen later in the year.
• PyHEP 2019 workshop (https://indico.cern.ch/e/PyHEP2019):
  • Agenda basically finalised at this stage.
  • Registration deadline is approaching very fast.
  • There are just over 50 participants.
  • Sponsorship from the Python Software Foundation granted, and highly appreciated!

Training

• Planning Software Carpentry event at CERN, 27-29 November.
  • Rooms are booked!
  • We are now looking for people to be helpers for the students - requirement is intermediate level skills in Python, git, shell
    • https://doodle.com/poll/7n9dpbhhmyk9hcm2.
    • Please sign up to help!
  • We need:
    • A poster to raise the profile (anyone good at graphics?).
    • Decide the final curriculum and find the tutors.

Event Generators

• Slow restart after the summer, no meetings yet.

Packaging

• Met Wednesday 11 September… good chat about Spack based on the work that Hobbs Willet (CERN Summer Student) did.
• Next meeting planned for 9 October, https://indico.cern.ch/category/7975/.

Frameworks

• New convenors appointed:
  • Chris Jones, FNAL, CMS.
  • Kyle Knoepfel, FNAL, Neutrino Community.
  • Attila Krasznahorkay, CERN, ATLAS.
• Had a discussion meeting yesterday to plan first activities.
  • Idea is to have a couple of initial meetings by CHEP to build the WG community.

Licensing

• Liz, Graeme and Michel met and decided it was not worth pursuing with FastJet developers in the short term, not very collaborative on the topic and not really available. The perspective remains a new jet clustering framework optimized for parallelism (US project) : details not available yet but will be done with proper credit to algorithm contributors.
  • Problem is FastJet license is GPL, but ATLAS and CMS want to have their offline code under an Apache2 license.
  • Andrea: it would be best to inform Fastjet developers well in advance that a US group is considering rewriting a Fastjet-like software using their ideas. We must be extra careful not to alienate people (especially from the theory community) even more. Andrea will send a message to Liz about this.
• Andrea - HEPiX benchmarking WG would like to know what the licensing is for packaged experiment software.
  • To be checked but not necessarily a problem if only the binaries are distributed
  • The people following this in the HEPiX WG are Michele Michelotto and Domenico Giordano. Andrea will tell them to get in contact with Michel and Graeme (thanks to both for volunteering to help!).

Workshops

Next HSF/WLCG Workshop

• Three bids: DESY, Sweden, Romania.
  • Bid documents are attached to the agenda.
  • Swedish bid has in fact 2 locations (2 sub-bids).
  • DESY only possible May 4-8
• Dates highly constrained: May 4-8 or May 11-15.
• Short presentations at the GDB on Wednesday:
  • https://indico.cern.ch/event/739882/.
  • GDB was supportive of DESY bid for reasons of cost.
• Open to responses now, or you can contact Graeme, Michel and David L. until early next week, or email wlcg-hsf-workshop-2020-organisation@cern.ch.

Pre-CHEP, Analysis Systems: From Future Facilities to Final Plots (2-3 November)

• Planning now well advanced.
  • Saturday we have a series of talks to inspire people:
    • Run 3 Analysis Challenge.
    • Run 4 / HL-LHC Analysis Challenge.
    • 2 talks about facilities, including IRIS-HEP work around DOMA (confirmed: X. Espinal).
    • Analysis workflow.
    • Machine learning (as part of the workflow).
    • Analysis preservation and its impact on analysis workflow (confirmed: Lukas Heinrich).
  • Sunday we plan interactive sessions around 4 key questions:
    • Facilities - how to organise for HL-LHC?
    • Interactive Analysis - what are the needs and challenges?
    • Machine Learning - how to manage training and inference; what is the scale of training and who does it?
    • Analysis Model - what are viable models for the future? Key points to improve or change.
• We have a very large level of participation, 160 people (makes Sunday a challenge to organise, but we think we can manage).

Latin American Workshop on Software and Computing Challenges in HEP (Mexico, Nov 20-23)

• Some progress in getting some speakers (e.g. Gordon Watts). Looking for another IRIS-HEP speaker.
• Will contact HSF WG convenors as well.
• Still looking for sponsorship.
• Registration is open. Ask HSF Coordinators to circulate information to their experiments.

AOB

• Stefan Roiser will go to the UK RSE conference next week, presenting software institute ideas.

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