Core Minutes 7/19/2005  

Present:    Pol D'Avezac, Joanne Bogart, Toby Burnett, David Chamont, Jim Chiang, Richard Dubois, Dan Flath, Warren Focke, Riccardo Giannitrapani, Berrie Giebels, Tom Glanzman, Navid Golpayegani, Tony Johnson, Heather Kelly, Michael Kuss, Matt Langston, Julie McEnery, Chuck Patterson, Igor Pavlin, James Peachey, Leon Rochester, Robert Schaeffer, Tom Stephens, Tracy Usher

There was very little to talk about other than DC2 readiness:

• Weekend runs: (Richard) 2 million event all-gamma and 10 million event background runs including the latest and greatest (as of last weekend) CAL code were largely successful, earlier Pipeline problems having been ironed out. Heather fixed a Data Server problem with concatenating files. There were some lesser glitches; see CAL discussion below.
• Peeler and Pruner: (Tom G.) Memory problems in Pruner have been fixed, reducing usage from over a gigabyte to about 70 megabytes.

  A new summer student (Andrey Goder) hit the ground running: he has already written a program to verify that the Peeler really retrieves the events it was requested to retrieve.

  Development of a secnd new indexer for TChains is in progress: design is done; first draft is ready for testing. This is something that is supposed to be part of ROOT proper, but isn't. [Related information from Tom: the first new indexer required an open file descriptor for every single data file. When the number of runs being processed in a task gets large enough (larger than about 950), the job crashes on Linux boxes: they have a default limit of 1024 open descriptors.  Tom has asked SCS to up this limit, but the second new indexer will not only solve this problem; it will also make for smaller and faster jobs.]

  Peeler works on all Tree data (MC, digi, recon) but not on tuples.

• Data server: (Tony) See the Data Server page for access to all its facilities. He has tested the web interface to the Pruner; everything seems ok, but it would be well if others would try it out. He was holding off on the Peeler in case it wasn't ready, but Tom says it is. It works for any ROOT Tree data (MC, digi, recon) but not for ntuple data.

  See this Data Catalog screen shot. It still needs a web interface. The Data Catalog can be used to keep track of Pipeline data or data produced remotely. Cataloging of Pipeline data should happen automatically; doesn't yet, though. Tony saw pruned datasets in Richard's hand-generated page. Is there such a thing as a standard pruning, which should autatically be cataloged? And if so, should users be allowed to further prune a pruned dataset? (Richard) Yes to both.

  Tony will be on vacatio next week. Igor will be back-up.

• I & T plans: (Warren) Expect data-taking throughout the week, including retaking the 6-tower data on Thursday and Friday. Another tracker is due by the end of the month, at which time we'll go to 8 towers. Then install ACD [do we take data with 8 towers before installing ACD?] and take data in that configuration.

  (Richard) With more towers, we're having to make runs shorter in order to avoid running up against per-job batch processing limits. This impacts data-taking. We hope to get around this by spreading out the recon step among multiple jobs. Warren made it official with JIRA request SVAC-68

• Background model: (Toby) See his presentation (pdf or ppt) on experience so far with background runs according to the DC2 scheme. The new collection could be used for training. Julie is interested in comparing new- and old-style background samples.
• CalRecon: (Tracy) The big changes in last weekend's runs concerned the moments analysis calculation and CAL mip-finding. Also David put in some exception handling, a very good thing since the code does on occasion throw exceptions. Unfortunately, a missing call in Merit kept the the output from the new mip-finding from making it all the way to the ntuple; it was in the ROOT tree. This is now fixed. There was also a problem with the moments analysis which was tracked down to a bug in CalXtalRecAlg (under certain circumstances, the energy was assigned to the wrong end of the crystal). Fix is now in and tagged [and Toby started up a new GR HEAD build, even as we spoke]. To get a handle on what's left, see this Confluence page. For reference see also the original refactoring proposal.
• More for next round: (Richard) So far we have a 10 million-event background run, and flawed at that. The original target was 100 million by mid-month. We'll try for this in the next week or so.

  (Julie) Change to CAL threshold has been agreed to; need to modify parameter(s?) in XML file.

  (Toby) There is still a problem with CAL LO trigger. Fixing it is Zach's highest priority.

  (Joanne) In order to use event time as generated by FluxSource, the job option parameter CalibDataSvc.CalibTimeSource should be allowed to take on its default value, "data". See CalibSvc mainpage, job options section, for a description of this parameter.

• Navid news: (Navid) He's added author lines to packages lacking them so that RM will always know who the culprit is. He's been working on the new archiver, which will support astore as well as mstore. astore and mstore are disk-to-tape-and-back systems supported by SCS. astore is newer and better (faster; larger file sizes).

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J. Bogart, Last Modified: 01-Jun-2010 15:48:08 -0700