HSF Coordination Meeting #217, 28 October 2021

Present/Contributing: Benedikt Hegner, Serhan Mete, Pere Mato, Aniket Raj, Kevin Pedro, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Stefan Roiser, Torre Wenaus, Daniel Elvira, Alexander Moreno, Efe Yazgan, Krzysztof Genser, Andrea Valassi, Allison, Michel Jouvin, Teng Jian Khoo, Kyle Knoepfel, Eduardo Rodrigues

Apologies: Graeme Stewart, Caterina Doglioni

News, general matters, announcements

HL-LHC Review Phase 2

Documents were delivered to the LHCC reviewers on time (1 October).

Many, thanks to the projects and individuals involved.

The finished versions are being put into CERNBox.

Graeme and Liz wrote a short introduction, that summarises the process.

N.B. The review itself will take place 1-5 November, hybrid at CERN + Zoomlandia. Attendance is being clarified with the LHCC, but it should be possible for some participation beyond document editors.

HSF Letters

The PR for clarification of the HSF policy on letters has been merged. The updated policy can still be found here: https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/organization/hsf-letters.html.

Andy Buckley is asking for a support letter for a new “ScotDIST Centre for Doctoral Training in data-intensive fundamental science”.

HSF Upcoming Talks

We have a few HSF talks upcoming:

Draft slides will appear!

Anaconda Licensing Change

Anaconda has changed it’s terms of service (ToS). Fermilab is expending effort to discover any violations of the ToSs and will remove them ASAP.

Working Group Updates

Mandates for 2022

We should start to think about WG convenerships for 2022

Data Analysis

Postponed yesterdays meeting due to MicroBooNE announcement, to reschedule for two weeks time. Will try and find alternative LHCb speaker for “Introduction to fitting in LHCb” talk.

Thinking about how to develop the initial brainstorming on benchmarks from last meeting, ideally solicit some more input and structure this better for continuing suggestions and discussion.

Detector Simulation

Nov 8: Meeting scheduled on new ML techniques for simulation (speakers confirmed, announcement circulated) December: tentative plans for meetings on DD4hep, FPGAs for simulation (contacting speakers)

PyHEP

No topical meeting this coming month (would be Nov. 3rd, next week). But December “module of the month” meeting on PyTorch about to be confirmed, for Dec. 8th.

Software Tools and Packaging

Last week’s WG meeting on “The Future of Spack”:

Overall it was very successful with a lot of discussions. You can find the Zoom recording on the agenda in case you missed the meeting.

Next week we’re going to have a conveners chat. One of the discussion points will be the updates in Anaconda licensing, its implications on us and how/if our WG can help the community (see above).

Software Training

HSF IRIS-HEP Training Challenge to be held on Nov 1st, 4pm CERN time (link to Indico).

Matplotlib training module under development (link to GitHub).

Organization of the next Software Carpentry training event on going. To be held on December 13 - 15, 2021.

Event Generators

Preparing slides for the review. We invited around 5-10 additional experts from various generator groups.

Frameworks

We met last week (Wednesday, Oct. 20) where Tadej Novak discussed pile-up digitization in Athena using overlays. Roughly 15 attendees:

We may have another session in the near future re. CMS’s framework-handling of generators that are not very conducive to multi-threading.

Other Interest and Activity Areas

Licensing

Agreed with HepMC3 maintainers to go for LGPL v2.1 and newer. Now all previous authors have to agree to the license change.


AOB

HSF Calendar

As dates start to be fixed for 2022, please add things to the HSF Community Calendar.

SIDIS EU COST Funding proposal

Aim to build a community on software engineering for computing accelerators and heterogeneous computing architectures, establish and connect training initiatives, raise the profile of software engineering in natural sciences. 30 proposers from 24 European countries from computer science institutes, natural sciences, HPCs, institutes bridging CS & NS. To be submitted this afternoon. Decision about funding expected mid-May 2022. COST implements an “open funding model”, ie. in case of funding more participants can join easily within the first year.

Next Meeting

Next meeting 11 November.