Applications Area Quarterly Report Contribution Jul-Sep 2002 ============================================================ This quarterly report is divided into the four activity areas underway during the quarter: software process and infrastructure (SPI), persistency framework (POOL), mathematical libraries, and LCG contributions to ROOT. The period from project initiation to July is covered briefly as well as 2002 Q3. Overall the quarter marked a major ramp-up of applications area activities in infrastructure and priority development work, with the initial work plan of our primary current development project, POOL, delivered to and accepted by the SC2, and a first internal release of POOL ready at the end of the period. Major areas of anticipated applications area scope remained to become active at the end of the period, pending project initiation by the SC2; these include simulation, detector description, event generators, physics interfaces and core libraries and services. A major activity of applications area managers and architects during the period was the development of an architectural blueprint in the context of an RTAG on that topic, which will open up project activity in some of these areas; the blueprint was nearing completion at the end of the period. WBS 1.1.1 - Software process and infrastructure (SPI) ----------------------------------------------------- The SPI project was initiated in early April and staffed in May with a 2.5 FTE commitment from IT/API. A first implementation of basic services for software development including a CVS/web server and associated services was put in place in April but early progress was otherwise slow due to a slow effort ramp and an extended search for a project leader. The rate of progress began to increase in July, the most important development being the appointment of Alberto Aimar (IT/API) as project leader in mid-July. Alberto worked quickly to engage LCG personnel and IT/API staff in a program prioritized around the needs of POOL, including testing, coding standards, repository structure, AFS delivery area, CVS needs, code browsers, documentation tools and other areas. POOL is collaborating closely with SPI. SPI developed a plan by which most arriving LCG hires spend an initial period working in SPI to both contribute to and learn the LCG software infrastructure and environment. By the end of the period, two new LCG hires assigned to SPI had come up to speed and were contributing substantially to the program. An SPI work plan was nearing completion at the end of the period, targeting delivery of initial versions of all SPI infrastructure components by the end of the year. An evaluation of the SCRAM and CMT configuration management tools was completed during the period, but its conclusions generated some controversy and the important issue of choosing a configuration management tool remained unresolved at the end of the period, pending a further evaluation. At the end of the period the manpower level was ~4 FTEs evenly divided between IT/API and new LCG hires. WBS 1.1.2 - Persistency framework (POOL) ---------------------------------------- Persistency framework project activities began with the appointment of Dirk Duellmann (IT/DB) as project leader in April. With an immediate commitment of 1FTE effort from CMS, Dirk moved rapidly to begin mapping out the hybrid data manager subsequently named 'POOL' that will be the principal deliverable of this project. Early work validated the selection of MySQL for the cataloging component as having adequate performance and robustness for production scenarios. In a two day workshop in early June with about 35 attendees, the priority requirements, work package breakdown, experiment effort commitments, and timeline were established, together with key decisions on component interfaces and implementation approaches. The effort level ramped by July to about 5 FTE participation from IT, LCG personnel and the experiments. With the team in place, design and development proceeded rapidly towards a first internal release. Almost daily design meetings were held for two months, enabling the project to quickly produce concrete proposals for the initial interfaces of the Storage, Data (cache) and Conversion services of POOL backed by early prototype implementations based on Root I/O persistency. The release, based on ROOT I/O plus MySQL for cataloging, emerged on schedule at the end of the period. It is the first important milestone in a work plan presented to and approved by the SC2 in August, with a first public release scheduled for end November (subsequently rescheduled to mid December, a couple of weeks late). The initial release proves that the POOL core components can provide navigational persistency on top of ROOT I/O. At the end of the period the manpower level was 5-6 FTEs, with ~1 FTE from IT/DB staff and the rest roughly evenly divided between LCG hires and experiment participants. WBS 1.1.3 - Mathematical libraries ---------------------------------- In June the mathematical libraries project got underway with the appointment of Fred James (EP) as project leader. Fred moved to act on the recommendations of the RTAG (which he also led), soliciting from the experiments information on their use of mathematical and statistical functions which the project should provide or recommend sources for, and working to line up the manpower to evaluate the availability, quality and performance of functions in available libraries such as GSL. At the end of the period negotiations were still underway with a group in India interested in working in this area. In September a CERN fellow joined Fred in the early planning of an OO/C++ redesign and reimplementation of Minuit. WBS 1.1.9 - ROOT participation ------------------------------ The LCG applications area contributes effort to the ROOT project. ROOT is used to implement vital parts of applications area software such as the object streaming technology of POOL. The LCG-contributed effort to mainstream ROOT development areas liberates the core members of the ROOT team to devote greater time to the specialized developments in ROOT I/O and elsewhere required by LCG software. LCG participants Ilka Antcheva, Valeriy Onouchine and Olivier Couet are contributing to GUI and graphics development, documentation, and a ROOT-Apache module supporting distributed use of ROOT based on embedding ROOT functionality in web pages. During the quarter the ROOT team and collaborators delivered and refined key functionality needed by POOL in support for 'foreign' classes not instrumented by ROOT, and expanded STL support in the ROOT I/O subsystem. Summary of important milestones during the quarter -------------------------------------------------- WBS 1.1.1 - SPI: - project leader Alberto Aimar appointed (Jul) WBS 1.1.2 - POOL: - POOL 2002 workplan approved by SC2 (Aug) - first implementation of POOL navigational components (Sep) Anticipated important near term milestones ------------------------------------------ WBS 1.1.1 - SPI: - Full infrastructure suite available in beta (Dec) WBS 1.1.2 - POOL: - First public prototype release V0.3 (Dec) WBS 1.1.4 - Core libraries and services: - Project initiation (Oct) WBS 1.1.5 - Physicist interface: - Project initiation (Nov) WBS 1.1.6 - Simulation: - Project initiation (Dec) WBS 1.1.7 - Generator services: - Project initiation (Dec)