Core Minutes 8 June 2010

Core Minutes 6/8/2010

Present: Joanne Bogart, Anders Borgland, Jim Chiang, Richard Dubois, Warren Focke, Tom Glanzman, Heather Kelly, Tom Stephens, Tracy Usher, John Vernaleo, Eric Winter

ScienceTools: (Jim) See details on a couple recent bug fixes in the Science Tools Development Notes.

There will be a new ST tag on about June 15th

(Richard) What is the function of Summed Likelihood? (Jim) It is a way to stitch together different Likelihood strategies in different (disjoint) regions into a single analysis, where "regions" can be in space, energy, etc.
FSSC: (John) No news to speak of; preparing for upcoming tag.
Pass7: (Richard, reporting on C & A hot topic) A new calibration of calorimeter longitudinal positions makes a significant difference in Cal reconstruction, eliminating various anomalies. Some would like to see a full reprocessing with this new calibration. That entails something like 2 months full-out with 2000 cores and regenerating about 1/2 petabyte of data, not something to be undertaken lightly. Eric Charles suggested classification tree cuts could get us most of the beneficial effects of the new calibrations. (Anders) See continuing discussion in Confluence.
Pass8: (Tracy) Snapshot of ongoing work includes:
- updating sim to include edge effects in crystals
- work on cal clustering in Pisa (along with longitudinal positions)
- Leon & Philippe are categorizing the PT events and learning about strategies for dealing with ghosts
- ..and we are working on tree based pattern recognition
Core talk:
- CLHEP upgrade: (Heather) We will upgrade to 2.0.4.6. It works with Geant. (Jim) has tried it with ST and committed (backwords-compatible) changes to ST code for all but GRB packages. He expects to use it in the new tag. (Heather) We should also try it on Mac.
- Gaudi upgrade: (Heather) Changes to calibration packages (to accommodate replacement within Gaudi of ITime interface with Time class) are done. The only remaining packages needing updates are HepRepSvc and LdfConverter The changes required are similar to those applied already to other packages and should go quickly.
- Python upgrade: (Heather) Our Windows python external was built with Studio 2003 which can cause problems when used on 2008 systems. There is no easy way to find or create a build of that Python version (2.5.1) for 2008 but binaries for 2.6.x are readily available. (Tom) had to make a small change to SConstruct to use python 2.6, but it only affects building distributions and probably is backwards-compatible; he'll check. (Heather) proposes that, to start, we only upgrade to 2.6 on Windows and hold off on other platforms until L1 processing, etc., can be checked out with the new version. She expects a month will be sufficient time for this. (Eric) Would this be 2.6.1? (Heather) More likely the current stable release, 2.6.5. (Jim) would like to have it available for Linux at SLAC so he can build ST against it. (Tom G.) does not anticipate any problems with it.
- Snow Leopard: (Heather) Kim continues to work through building externals, only Xerces and ROOT left to do.
- u09: (Heather) It's still close to full. Looks like we'll have to archive some old Beamtest releases to tape.
- Windows builds: (Heather, Tom S.) are problematic for both CMT and SCons since the .ssh directory, containing the known_hosts file and other essentials needed for access to the CVS repository, has a tendency to spontaneously disappear. The disappearance is correlated with logins to the glast account for interactive work, but no one has any idea why. (Richard) Could the files be made read-only? Could we copy somewhere else so it is at least easy to recover? (Heather) Suspects making it read-only won't affect what happens from the glast account, but no harm in trying. It would be good to copy somewhere else (i.e., other than the Z disk).
- SCons topics
  
  (Joanne)
  - Chuck has installed updated SCons pages in the workbook.
  - Various problems with Windows project file creation have cropped up. They've been there for several months, ever since she made a change to solve a problem concerning calculation of library dependencies. After bug fixes to tools in site_tools project files are being written correctly. One issue of environment propagation from GoGui to Studio remains.
  - The issues with rootcint uncovered by Nicola are understood and fixed but not yet committed to CVS.
  (Tom) Email notifications are now working correctly. He has been working on
  - creating distributions for Windows builds. In progress
  - eraseBuild. He believes it's now working correctly on Linux; still some work to do on Windows.
  - email notifications from RM are working correctly.
  (Jim, Tom S., Joanne) Jim tried to install an SCons build of ST for Elliott, expecting it to be straightforward, but it wasn't. Although the desired user distribution (09-16-01 redhat5 64-bit, optimized) had been built by RM, it was not registered in the database; it was built before Tom fixed an old problem causing such failures. The gui installer only downloads user distributions. The command-line installer will download developer or source distributions as well, but can only find them if the user dist. is registered, hence neither installer could retrieve any distribution for this tag/platform combination. Joanne was able to install the developer dist with RMViewer. Tony J. has promised to look into enhancing the gui installer to handle all distribution types. And Tom will fix the database entry for this build.
- Turning off CMT builds of ST (Heather) Target is end of June. She'll make a to-do list. Among items to be included:
  - Creating Doxygen from SCons builds
  - (Joanne) Making ST HEAD and release tag builds. Currently they are created automatically when a corresponding CMT build takes place.

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J. Bogart, Last Modified: 15-Jun-2010 12:53:31 -0700