Core Minutes 1/13/2004  

Present:    Sandhia Bansal, Ursula Berthon, Joanne Bogart,  Toby Burnett,  Jim Chiang, Johann Cohen-Tanugi, Seth Digel,  Dan Flath, Ugo Gasparini, Berrie Giebels, Navid Golpayegani, Traudl Hansl-Kozanecka,  Heather Kelly, Michael Kuss, Pat Nolan, Dirk Petry,  Leon Rochester,  Robert Schaefer, Tom Stephens

The meeting was spent on topics from Toby's status page

• Network problems: (Toby) Connectivity from Goddard to various other sites, including glast.stanford.edu and U. Washington. Would be helpful to get the network monitoring discussed last week going. (Tom) These problems may be more widespread than Goddard.

  There have also been problems recently with Glast02, impacting those who recently switched from Glast01 to Glast02 as CVS server and also the use of the Tag Collector.

• External library upgrades: (Toby)
  • Heather has been keeping close watch on the upgrade to Root 3.10.  So far it seems to be fine on Windows. Problems on Linux are less likely; she plans to look at System Tests output (for example) .
  • Gaudi upgrade to Gaudi v12r0 appears to have gone through smoothly. There are no interface changes which would impact us.
  • "use" statements for several interface packages (for Gaudi, AIDA, HTM, MySQL) which are needed only by GlastRelease have been removed from IExternal and added to GlastRelease, in accordance with the policy that IExternal only use externals required by both GlastRelease and ScienceTools.

  Current problems with the Release Manager need to be ironed out before we can be sure how all of the above are working out.

• CMT upgrade: (Toby, Traudl) The new CMT (v1r14p20031120) has been installed at SLAC. People are encouraged to switch to it. The next GlastRelease might depend on features introduced in this version. There is at least one known incompatibility: it doesn't recognize Geant4 as a package name (work-around in progress).

  Traudl has been trying out the new, and very attractive, release area feature. So far, she has had partial success (executables end up in the release area, but not libraries).

• Xerces 1.7 to 2.4: (Joanne) What may be the last round (before Xerces move) of xml package enhancements is about done. Next step is to upgrade packages using xml services to get rid of as many native Xerces calls as possible. This will ease the Xerces transition somewhat, though it still won't be much fun.
• Compiler upgrades: (Toby, Alex, Joanne) Visual Studio 7.1 upgrade status: still in limbo. Now that the move to the new Gaudi is accomplished and  there is a Redhat 9/gcc 3.2 batch system at SLAC we are poised to make Redhat 9/gcc 3.2 the default for Linux. However for now Goddard is stuck at Redhat 7.x.  gcc 3.2 is available there and has been used successfully by Dirk; Tom encountered problems. Even if we move to Redhat9/gcc 3.2 as a default, we ought to be able to provide support for older systems (pre-built binaries for external libraries and perhaps for releases). Building locally one way or the other should just be a matter of setting CMTCONFIG appropriately.

• Release Manager enhancements: (Alex) The list of problems and proposed solutions/enhancements for the Release Manager is not quite as daunting as it looks since much of the work is close to done. He hopes to have a version with the most crucial features (robust against interference problems among concurrently-running jobs; support for multiple CMTCONFIG settings; ability to run on batch farm rather than just glast03) ready in about a week. Next highest priority is Windows support, then the remainder.

• Sequencing: (general) Traudl points out we'll never be able to untangle problems if we attempt to install the pending changes all at once.One ordering [Disclaimer: just my guess. Others are possible and perhaps preferable. ed.] of the relatively short-term items might be

  • resolve problems with current Release Manager so that builds are (again) normally completed successfully.
  • verify that external library upgrades (not including Xerces, which won't be ready for some time) are OK
  • install first version of new ReleaseManager
  • use RH9/gcc 3.2 for ReleaseManager builds
  • recommend RH9/gcc 3.2 environment for all Linux users
  • move to new CMT
• Action items: After languishing for weeks if not months, have finally been updated somewhat! Take a look immediately below.

  Action Items 

• Document effect of MC pruning options (Riccardo) (8/5/2003) It's documented in the code; Tracy will look into putting the information in a more accessible place. (9/2/2003)
• Reorganize RootAnalysis package so structure is more standard.(05/13/03) Done! (1/13/2004 or earlier)
• Write up, and perhaps present at a future meeting, hints on debugging. (02/18/03)   Some combination of Toby and Tracy will provide something for Windows.(7/22/03) 
• Overhaul documentation altogether by about November (Heather and ??) (9/2/2003) In progress; not yet done (01/13/04)
• Resolve calibration/timestamp issue. (11/20/02) Online folk have not yet thought about putting timestamp information into EM data, but, thanks to Richard's inquiry, may now do so. (2/25/03) We can probably live without a realistic system for EM, but we will put it on the agenda for the DC1 workshop.(5/6/03) At the DC1 Workshop Steve Ritz  promised to find an authoritative reference for timestamp format and pass it on. (7/17/03) Now that events have "real" timestamps, Joanne needs to reassess situation with Calibration (9/2/2003) Timestamp exists in EM data. Needs to be fetched by Calibration (1/13/04)

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J. Bogart Last Modified: 01-Jun-2010 15:46:43 -0700