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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?
  • Wait till 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

• Interesting discussions being held on our Gitter channel https://gitter.im/HSF/PyHEP.
• A new room https://gitter.im/HSF/PyHEP-histogramming has been created for technical discussions around histogramming tools following the DIANA-HEP meeting of this Monday, see https://indico.cern.ch/event/759556/. Feel free to join as the future of those tools will be discussed there.

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
    • Done https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.01191
  • 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?

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