EPSCI Group Meeting Mar. 22, 2021

The meeting time is 10:00am.

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Agenda:

1. Previous meeting

2. Announcements
   • DE-FOA-0002490 $50k-$2M for 2 years. Meeting Thur@2pm bluejeans
   • SC_FOA_0002482 $100k-$2M/year for 3 years. Meeting Mon@3pm
   • Fortnight paper for Mar. 29: HEP-Frame: Improving the efficiency of pipelined data transformation & filtering for scientific analyses

3. Conferences and Workshops
   • Workshop: CFNS-ANL Joint Workshop on Instrumenting the 2nd IR at the EIC (Mar. 17-19)
   • SEA'S IMPROVING SCIENTIFIC SOFTWARE CONFERENCE AND TUTORIALS 2021 (Mar. 22-26)
     • Vardan: Streaming data processing from multiple satellite data sets under the NASA/GEWEX SRB project. (Mar. 26 @ 1pm)
   • Autonomous Discovery in Science and Engineering workshop (April 20-22)
   • vCHEP2021 (May 17-21)
     • Thomas, Kishan: Hydra
     • Vardan, Nathan, David (+Hall-B, Fast Electronics, and TriDAS groups): TriDAS + JANA2 SRO
     • David: HOSS!
   • ACAT2021 (Nov. 29 - Dec. 3)

4. Ongoing Activities
   • Scientific Software support
     • JLab Common Environment (CE) + SPACK
       • ServiceNow (mapmanager, fputil, fpack, bos, bankdef)
       • HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: Everyone please read the Quickstart Instructions and test the system. Report any issues.
     • EIC
       • ACTS
       • Collaboration with ANL
     • Offline frameworks (CLARA, JANA2)
   • Data Transport
     • Meetings Tue., Wed., and Fri.
   • DAQ systems
     • SRO
       • SAMPA + ERSAP + JANA2 + INDRA-ASTRA = April 1st
     • CODA (CODA3 support, EVIO-6)
   • A.I.
     • GPU purchase for ENP
     • Hydra paper
     • Jupyterhub + GPU
       • David's notes on using venv
     • Experimental Controls
   • Offsite Computing
     • NERSC, PSC, IU
       • XSEDE application for PSC bridges-2 declined
     • OSG
5. AOT

---

Minutes:

Attendees: David L., Carl T., Nathan B., Kishan R., Vardan G., Thomas B., Mike G.

• Announcements

• SPACK
  • CODA packages basically ready to go
  • Need to set permissions on epsci-spack repository on GitHub to allow others to commit
  • Some issue with last few packages from JLabCE 2.4
    • build system not fully contained in source tarballs

• ACTS
  • Upgraded to 6.2
    • Nathan is going through the new tutorials which give a lot of info. Going through them in order to make sure he doesn't missing anything.
  • Running some simple test cases provided by Dmitry. Not all of them working yet.
  • Able to identify small bug in JANA2 making the exercise useful to JANA2 development and not just EIC/ACTS
  • Close to point where genfit/RAVE can be completely abandoned

• JANA2
  • David put in a pull request for some Python API support changes and some minor changes to core classes.

• CLARA
  • clara1602 and clara1603 are two of three computers that were purchased with a grant Vardan had to work on the NASA project a few years back
    • Computers were in the farm, but not being utilized. Bryan pulled them and repurposed them as dedicated ifarm machines for CLAS
  • CLAS12 production processing on farm is underway (or very soon to be if not already)

• Data Transport
  • Met with fast electronics group and ESnet folks last week
  • Need to purchase pair of Xilinx U280 cards (ESnet people said cards we had were too old)
  • They were interested in broader area use cases (e.g. EIC to JLab)
  • More discussions are needed on JLab side to converge on some clearer specs.
    • Mike has scheduled a few meetings with various players this week to try and work this out
  • Mike looked up that Dark fiber refers to unused fibers in a bundle that have already been strung.
    • It looks like there is some excess capacity out there we may be able to use
  • Eventually will get copy of firmware from the ESnet guys we will use for initial testing.

• SRO
  • Vardan continues VTP system performance studies
  • Plans to introduce Data Lake to try and "cool down" the stream to eliminate all frame loss at higher rates.

• CODA
  • Oracle is dropping support for some packages causing alternatives to be explored
    • Vardan considering moving to web-based and possible hand-held. Wants to discuss with others first as it will take some effort to implement.

• AI
  • GPU purchase finalized
    • 3 nodes of 16x Nvidia T4 cards each
      • Last may be half full due to budget constraint
  • Hydra paper
    • Multiple comment sets generated.
  • Jupyterhub
    • Some issues with custom kernels
  • AI Experimental Controls
    • Thomas working on roadmap for project work
    • Diana starts May 1st
      • Preliminary capstone project sketch submitted

• OSG
  • Issue identified
    • Log files for condor being written to /volatile disk
    • Culprits notified and rectifying situation
  • scosg20 will not have lustre mounted at all to eliminate these types of issues
  • working to pull lustre from scosg16 as well.