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HSF Weekly Meeting #150, 8 November, 2018

Present/Contributors: Graeme Stewart, R.M.Bianchi (offline), Xiaomei Zhang, Pere Mato, Tommaso Boccali, Davide Costanzo, Eduardo Rodrigues, Serhan Mate, Dario Menasce, David Lange, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Michel Jouvin, Daniel Elvira, Witek Pokorski, Mark Neubauer

News, general matters

Quantum Computing

• OpenLab Quantum Computing workshop was this week at CERN.
  • Huge success, the CERN main auditorium was full (~400 people registered).
• It looks there is much interest in QC from HEP, especially (at least at this stage) at the exploration level.
  • “We don’t know if we will be able to use QC for our needs, and on which timescale, but it would be a shame not to explore the field” (freely quoted from F.Carminati).
• From that there is interest in a new HSF working group looking at QC matters
  • A new “interest group” was started during the workshop, by a small group of interested people from different HEP experiments (R.M.Bianchi, S.Binet, R.Di Sipio, L.Heinrich, M.Pierini), to discuss QC topics: technologies, SW frameworks, potential HEP use cases and test tasks, grants, common projects.
  • A new mailing list can be found at the link below (please, feel free to subscribe, if interested).
    • https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/hsf-quantumcomputing-wg
  • A new page for the group will be created soon within the HSF web site.
• General comments: Second day much better than the first. OpenLab IBM workshop soon, will cover some QC toolkits.

HSF/WLCG/OSG workshop

• Meeting last week to start to plan in more detail the agenda:
  • Broad outline to start with plenary sessions concentrating on experiment and facility plans, which are of common interest.
  • Then start to split into more technical parallel sessions.
    • I think for HSF we should try and avoid too much overlap between software oriented sessions, but we will have a lot to fit in.
    • Session coordinators will be required.
  • Friday morning will likely be a final plenary (finish at lunchtime).
  • Reminder - send any input you have to David, Graeme, Michel.
• Agenda placeholder
• Practical matters:
  • Early registration ~$125, late ~$175
  • Dinner event separately billed at ~$77 (Maritime museum, mingling format)
  • Hotels blocked for ~$99/night
  • N.B. No lunch included as options were not attractive on-site, 90-min breaks envisaged.
  • We hope to get registration opened ASAP (well before Christmas).
    • Car sharing much encouraged!
• Question about an open call for abstracts: not planned. Session conveners are in charge to identify the potentially interesting talks and invite the speaker.
  • Does not prevent managing specifically the people whose ability to attend is linked to the fact they present something, please contact organisers to discuss this (and get letters of invitation).

New Working Groups

• Final list of candidates is available.
• Coordination group discussed how to make a balanced selection, with a mechanism that allows people to give candid opinions.
  • Setup a “search committee” to take input confidentially until 16 November (from all).
  • SC is Andrea Valassi, Benedikt Hegner, Graeme Stewart, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Michel Jouvin.
  • Contact: hsf-wg-search-committee@cern.ch.
  • SC will propose a list of candidates for further discussion with Coordination Team w/b 19 November.
  • Announce decision 26 November (after Thanksgiving).

Generators Software Computing Workshop

• Preparations almost complete now:
  • Indico agenda.
  • Sessions from experiments, generators, optimising use, NNLO, HPCs.
• 44 people registered.
  • Please sign up if you’re coming (otherwise no coffee!).

Activity updates

Licensing

• Would like meeting with the fastjet developers after the generators workshop on Tuesday 27 November:
  • Email sent to Fastjet people this morning trying to confirm the possibility.
  • ATLAS and CMS will give input.
  • We should get input from KT as well.

Training

• Please comment on David’s training survey.

Packaging

• Last meeting was 7 November.
  • Discussed Spack work in SFT and also new features in lcgcmake to generate local installations.
  • Minutes here.

Software Development

• Planning a meeting in November on monitoring tools - Servesh has confirmed his interest.

Software Forum

• Yesterday HEP analysis in the Numpy ecosystem.
  • Very interesting discussion on awkward arrays and array computation syntax.
• Next meeting discussion with the Electron Ion Collider Software Consortium, 21 November.
• Topics for next year - please suggest!

PyHEP

• HSF page updated to give a better overview of activities, see https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/workinggroups/pyhep.html.
• Still would like an Intensity Frontier contact.

Technical Notes

• All technical notes now have a DOI via Zenodo, see https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/technical_notes.html.

CWP

General Matters and Roadmap

• CSBS review comments.
• Editorial secretariat (aka Michel, Eduardo, Graeme, David) worked this week!
  • Hopefully, we think we addressed most of the comments: included some refinements to the CWP (new references, a couple of new R&D actions for items referenced as important but not in the roadmap).
  • We plan to submit these modifications in the next days.
  • We still need to sort out a problem with reference resolution messing up the PDF rendering.
• Do we want to update arXiv with the last version (at the end mostly improvements)? Yes, we agreed on that.

Publication status for Individual WG Papers

• Data Organisation, Management and Access
  • Waiting input from Bo (on holiday at the moment).
• Visualization
  • The Visualization CWP is now close to completion. Updated documents.
• Event/Data Processing Frameworks
  • References improved - last circulation to potential wider author list then publish.

AOB

• HSF Logo in vector format - reminder of action on Benedikt.

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Discussion with Xiaomei Zhang on IHEP Software Interests

See slides.

• Small software group in IHEP, supporting running and future experiments.
  • Discussed that CEPC would be a massive project.
• Several areas where we would like to collaborate identified.
  • Are IHEP willing to contribute to software developments as well as use them? Yes.
• Important to get people to the JLab workshop as a first step in face to face discussions.
• Timezone is a practical difficulty, given that meetings are pulled to maximise US/EU attendance.
• A visit (sometime next year?) of a few key HSF members to China could be an additional good step to establishing common work programmes.
• Xiaomei Zhang can act as point of first contact.

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