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:
- ILCX workshop 26-29 Oct, Graeme invited to speak on HEP computing challenges and the HSF
- Swift-HEP workshop 2-3 Nov, Caterina invited to speak on The HSF landscape
- Small Experiments Workshop
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
- Normally WG conveners serve for 2 years, by mutual agreement (but this is not set in stone)
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”:
- Agenda: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1078600/
- Speaker: Dr. Todd Gamblin
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).
- Currently 15 participants.
- Topics to discuss: scalability and sustainability of training activities, scope, diversity and inclusion.
- Focus on hearing from different experiments about how they do training. A survey has been circulated between participants for collecting information.
Matplotlib training module under development (link to GitHub).
- A task force has been organized. Discussing chapters to include, open-data sets for exercises, tools to use (mplhep for example).
- Interest in contributing? Join us in our regular weekly meetings!
Organization of the next Software Carpentry training event on going. To be held on December 13 - 15, 2021.
- Carpentries instructors to be confirmed.
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.
- Andrea: very interesting! Please inform me, Efe and Josh so that we can also extend the info to the generator WG. This is a known issue that we have discussed in the CSBS paper and in the LHCC review document.
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.
- Graeme added ATLAS Weeks and ATLAS S&C Weeks for 2022
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.