Attendees

David Lange, John Harvey, Rolf Seuster, Andrea Valassi [REMOTE],  Nicolo Magini, Peter Hristov, Pere Mato, Marco Clemencic,  Gerri Ganis, Markus Elsing,   

Excused

Gabriele Cosmo 

Agenda (in indico)

• Action Items
• Line Management Issues (John)
• Report from the LIM meeting (Patricia)
• News from projects
• Experiments Feedback
• AoB

version 0 (6/01/2015 @ 13:00)

News

• Alejandro Álvarez Ayllón is replacing Nicolo Magini as IT representative
• Patricia replaces Benedikt as SPI and she is running the LIM meetings
• Pere will be replaced as AA Manager and chair of the AF. He is currently taking some responsibilities in the startup of HSF. 

 

Line Management Issues (John)

• New Fellow ROOT for the ROOT projects is staring in February.
• New Technical Student for CVMFS testing will also start in February.

 

Report from the LIM meeting (Patricia)

• The new LCG_72root6 software version has been released on the 13th January in the morning
  • LHCb had already included the new LCG release in their own build system and for the meeting time being no issues had been found in this new version.
• Inclusion of COOL/CORAL specific tests in the nighty test suite. Proposal agreed by Andrea
• A the revision of several external packages had been already requested in the past. This review will include pyanalysis in particular and also python (the current version is not compatible with the latests MAC OS). New packages versions will be tested through the nightly tests. In particular LHCb has requested the inclusion of the gtests package (google alternative to cpptest. Specific SPI ticket has been submitted)
• LCG_72 release
  • ATLAS has requested the installation of Fastjet3.1.1 with ROOT5 as soon as possible. This new package will be added to dev2 and dev4 nightly tests and based on the results, a new LCG release will be produced as soon as possible. For package consistency, this new package will be released as "LCG_72a" including ROOT5.
    • A LCG_72aroot6 is also foreseen afterwards. The installations will have to be provided also for 32b machines. The current 32b machine used for this particular installation will be added to the Jenkins infrastructure to automatize this installation.
• Discussed the current incremental nightly builds approach excluding packages already built to speedup the process.  Python, Qt and GSL packages are rebuild with each devX run. The nightly builds are therefore much faster now.
• Further improvements in the current Savannah migration effort. CMS feedback will be requested to close this task
• Discussion about the current build display in cdash affecting in particular COOL and CORAL (extensible to the rest of projects). Experiments/developers claim that the current display does not enable an easy cross-check of these specific packages. An easy access to the log files is requested not only in the case of errors, also for proper builds the access to the log files is requested to avoid fake builds that can affect the experimental builds. A more verbose package dependencies information is requested. The LIM members will be added to the set of persons that have read access to the Jenkins instance to access the information provided there.

 News from Projects

• ROOT
  • Version 6.02/02 has been released. It seems that we go for a monthly development and bug fix releases.
  • There will be a ROOT user’s workshop from 15-18 September in Saas-Fee. Announcement will follow.
  • LHCb  99% decided to use ROOT6 for 2015 run, CMS is ROOT 6, and ATLAS is making a lot of progress. ALICE can run on ROOT 6 but not decided to move. 
• PF
  • Nothing else to report.
• Simulation
  • New release 10.1 made by Christmas. Reported at the G4 Technical Forum yesterday. It contains a lot of improvements in handling the memory, such that the memory footprint has been reduced by half. The speedup has also been improved considerable (10%). 
  • Feedback from CMS and ATLAS at the Forum.
    • Good report on the use of MT by CMS.
    • ATLAS feedback on the fixes included in the 9.6 branch
    • Expected to prepare a patch (in fact 2 patches, one for 9.6 and one for 10.1)
    • Discussion at the next Technical Forum for how long to maintain the various versions.    
• CernVM-FS
  • Release of  2.1.20 next week
    • Fixes here and there to address most of the problems.
    • Tested by LHCb during the nightlies. 
    • Garbage collection implementation.
    • Backend S3 is now available.
  • New tag on CernVM 3.4 (before CHEP)
    • fixes and contextualization
    • SLC7-base image is in the pileline 

Experiments Feedback

 

• ALICE:
  • Geant4-MT is now working (using the VMC)
  • No concrete plans for adopting ROOT6 at this run. 
• ATLAS:
  • Nobody present. Making good progress in validating ROOT6.
• LHCb:
  • Making the builds with CMake instead of CMT, so far so good.
  • Performance improvements in the HTL (Gerhard Raven). In the area of matrices (5x5) he could make sizable improvements by implementing explicit operations and making use of intrinsics.
• CMS:
  • Nobody present.

AoB

• The WLCG/HEPiX benchmarking working group would appreciate being informed of AF’s recommendation for compilers and compilation/linking flags.
  • ​Agreed to communicate [ -O2 -pthread -fPIC -m64 ]
• IT would like to ask if the Grid clients in AFS [*] are still used and how, to understand if it’s still necessary to support them. [*] /afs/cern.ch/sw/lcg/external/Grid/
   
  • We would like to build the clients ourselves from sources for the platforms we need and using the versions of depend packages from a given LCG configuration.
  • Patricia will take over this. 
• AF meetings for this year
  • 12 February 2015
  • 12 March 2015
  • 9 April 2015
  • 7 May 2015
  • 4 June 2015
  • 2 July 2015
  • 13 August 2015
  • 10 September 2015
  • 8 October 2015
  • 5 November 2015
  • 3 December 2015