Core Minutes 16 January 2007

Core Minutes 1/16/2007

Present: Joanne Bogart, Anders Borgland, Toby Burnett, David Chamont, Jim Chiang, Johann Cohen-Tanugi, Richard Dubois, Dan Flath, Warren Focke, Riccardo Giannitrapani, Nicola Giglietto, Tom Glanzman, Berrie Giebels, Navid Golpayegani, Heather Kelly, Michael Kuss, Bryson Lee, Chuck Patterson, Leon Rochester, Tracy Usher, Larry Wai

MRStudio: (Riccardo) See his write-up for current status and the start of a tutorial.
Compile on Windows now works more like Linux in that one must set the global check box to do an operation like configure or compile on all packages the selected one depends on. The standard compile does not use solution files, however they are needed by those wishing to debug. Riccardo is working on supporting this and hopes to have a new version this evening.
Data Server: (David C.) A new version of the Skimmer does a better job of finding needed libraries. Users won't see it until it front-end is upgraded to use this version sometime after Igor gets back next week.
ROOT upgrade: (Heather) has been working on upgrading to 5.14. Generally speaking it's looking good. Although 5.14 is advertised as supporting Visual Studio 8, the binary build provided by ROOT Central doesn't do the job. It should be possible to build and distribute ourselves. (Toby) There is no need to require that it work with VS 8 right off the bat; that can be done later. There are other external libraries standing in the way of a move to VS 8.
(Heather) The HEAD of IExternal/ROOT has been updated to specify 5.14. She will build the new ROOT for VS 8.0 and document the procedure before disappearing, probably around Feb. 6, for two months' maternity leave. There is a question of python version. Right now we're at 2.4.1. (Bryson) FSW and Online will probably be moving to 2.5 soon. (Toby) We should have a plan to move in concert to 2.5. It's stable and is likely to be the preferred version for some time since the next release, 3.0, won't be backwards compatible. [(Joanne) Jim Panetta's development system, used for testing out MOOT among other things, has already gone to the new python, so I need a 2.5 python and compatible swig for MOOT development and distribution. I talked it over with Navid and Jim last week. We decided I would make branch tags for python and swig so as not to interfere with GlastRelease or ScienceTools.]
Compiler support: (Navid) Concerning unix, SCS will upgrade two of our machines to (32-bit) RHEL4; later they'll configure some Farm machines this way. Concerning Mac, Tiger externals are all done for Tiger PowerPC (for ScienceTools only, not for GlastRelease). There is a problem on Tiger Intel: although it has a gcc 3.4 compiler, it's not useful to us (produces PowerPC binaries). Tiger Intel also has gcc 4.0, but we're not ready for that yet.
RM and disk space: (Richard) The u09 disk used by RM gets filled up regularly and is also due for an upgrade. Tom has made some space elsewhere. (Navid) plans to direct some kinds of builds to the new space. For now html files (a small fraction of the build output) will continue to go to u09. Navid and SCS will find a mutually agreeable a time for the u09 upgrade, expected to take a day or two. RM will have to be taken down during the upgrade.
Service Challenge:
- Level 0 simulation (Tom) A test data set has been available since last week. Remaining problems:
  - Pulsar timing problem causes Gleam to crash. It seems to be associated with a new celestialSources release.
  - There was a limit of 26 on the number of source libraries which could appear in job options; we now need at least 29. Toby has fixed this one.
  Migration to Pipeline 2 is in progress.
- Level 1 pipeline (Warren) There has been some backwards motion since last Thursday; that is, additional complications have become evident. However there are no insuperable difficulties; just somewhat more work to be done, now in progress. He hopes to have the L1 pipeline working for the End-to-end test of Feb. 21 or thereabouts.
- Spacecraft geometry (Joanne) Steve Ritz gave me a list of the more important volumes to simulate as well as some engineering drawings. I need a few numbers (requested last week) before I can get too far in writing the XML for the spacecraft proper. Marc Kippen, who gave the GBM talk at the Service Challenge meeting, promised to send me materials concerning the GBM but, in spite of a couple email reminders, I haven't heard from him since.
MOOT for Offline (Joanne) I wrote up some plans months ago which are still current. [So far other MOOT developments have taken priority over work specific to Offline, though some groundwork has been laid by splitting the original single unofficial MOOT package into two: mootCore, containing basic utilities and everything else required to make queries of interest to Offline, and MOOT. In due time mootCore will be incorporated into GlastRelease; MOOT, which depends on parts of Flight Software, is only for use online.]
Background interleave (Toby, Heather) Known problems have been fixed. More testing is needed. Goal is to have it ready for the 55-day run in mid-February.
Irreducible backgrounds (Tracy) Bill wants to have certain additional information available to identify background photons which cannot be excluded by reasonable cuts because they appear just like "good" photons. The plan is to save MC trajectories for selected particles. It should be possible to derive everything else Bill is interested in from this.
What's going on at Spectrum Astro? (Bryson) They're finishing up functional tests. There were some issues with forwarding information here—in particular, unnecessary forwarding of empty runs—which have been addressed. (Anders) is not so much in the loop; he gets his news indirectly. See for example page 3 of Ken's talk. (Richard) When will Thermal Vac be? [Deafening silence.] Would like to know because disk space is limited. Another 50 Tbytes are on their way.
AOB: (Leon) has written an alternate basic options file, called basicOptions_test.txt, which makes everything in Top a sequence. This is chiefly of interest to those who might be mucking around with Gaudi sequences, who will appreciate the extra flexibility. If the new file can be shown to handle Interleave and other production configurations correctly, it should someday replace basicOptions.txt

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J. Bogart, Last Modified: 01-Jun-2010 15:47:38 -0700