AF meeting 18 July 2005

Attendees

Fons, Alberto, John, Rene, Dirk, Andreas, Gabriele, Marco, Vincenzo, Pere

Agenda

• Line management issues (John)
• Action items
  • Experiments to provide the list of contact persons for each SEAL+ROOT topic (CMS) (see list http://lcgapp.cern.ch/project/mgmt/coretopics2.html )
• AA Phase II Plans
  • Status of the document
• SEAL packages maintenance by ROOT team
  • Required list of packages (provided by the experiments) 
• SEAL foundation licensing
• Releases status
• Experiments feedback
• Platform issues
• AoB

Minutes

Line  management issues (John)

• The CERN DG has instigated an audit to the PH department. Each group will be audited, looking in particular  at the mandate, resources, input/output, clients and the process by which the group works.
• Accounting of resources assigned to the AA needs to be prepared for the C-RRB after the next one in September. We therefore need to collect up to date information on contributions from the experiments towards the manpower working on the AA projects. The actual experiment contributions to the AA projects will be the starting point. Pere will collect this information from the projects and circulate the list to the experiments for cross-check. The time dependency could be handled by updating the table at the beginning of each year.

Action items

Nothing to report

AA Phase II Plans. Status of the document

• The ROOT section will be modified by Rene taking into account the decisions of last week special meeting (new SEAL work package).
• Dirk will be sending the  updates to the POOL section basically now.
• The new final date for full approval (AF, PEB, etc.) of the document will be end of September.

SEAL packages maintenance by ROOT

• The list of required packages of the SEAL project has been provided by the experiments. This is is summarized at the end of these minutes. It was decided to take a package level approach rather than a library to indicate what needs to be maintained.

SEAL foundation libraries licensing

• Pere circulated a mail to the AF concerning the LGPL license affecting the SEAL foundation packages. With this license you can copy the source code, and this will make the new library to became LGPL (or similar) but not the rest of the libraries and programs of the project. Vincenzo claimed that anything ever released in LCG is now LGPL, so there is in fact no difference between the SEAL foundation libraries and the rest of LCG/AA software. The conclusion was that this should not be a problem for the time being.
• The current license situation with ROOT was briefly explained. Both Fons and Rene hold the copyright of ROOT and to copy or re-distribute the whole or parts of ROOT can only be done only with the permission of the copyrights holders. The situation needs to be clarified further, probably involving the CERN legal service. It was decided that John and Rene will follow it.

Release status

• SEAL 1.7.1 has been rebuild. It contains the latest bug fixes.  It is  based on the configuration LCG_36_1, which includes ROOT version 4.04/02f.
• POOL 2.1.2 is a production release of POOL. It is built with the same configuration.
• COOL 1.2.2 coming out.
• POOL 2.2.0 (also based on SEAL 1.7.1) and using  Reflex is also being finalized. There will be a build done in parallel to allow the experiments to validate it.
• Alberto announced that for the next 2 and 1/2 weeks the SPI support will be very limited due to various people taking holidays. During this time no changes in the external libraries are expected and therefore no changes in the current configuration. New releases of SEAL/POOL can be done in case urgency in local disks or AFS space. No distribution tar files or documentation will be produced.
• Rene announces that the scheduled release of ROOT on August 15th will be cancelled mainly due to holidays. The next one will happen on September 20th (just before the ROOT workshop). Eventually a  pre-release at the beginning of September would allow the experiments (and the POOL experts)  to validate the compatibility of POOL with the new version of ROOT.

Experiments feedback

• LHCb is starting to use MathCore. Feedback is being circulated.
• CMS is building their software against POOL 2.1.1. The test of the catalog is done via the Python interface. The new catalogs of POOL have not been tested.

Platform issues

• Dirk reported on the discussions together with Grid middleware and deployment concerning the dependencies of the external packages with the goal to agree with a coherent set of external packages versions. The problem he mentioned is of the "hidden dependencies" putting as an example the MySQL library that needs to patched with given version of Globus SSL. Another area of problems is the fact that the libraries need to be build with the same flavor (pthread, debug, etc.) and a potential issue with gSoap, which assumes a single Grid interface in the system by using of global variables. The conclusion is that configuration needs to be communicated across areas.
  Several actions can be done to minimize the risk of conflicts, for example to separate the release of the client packages from the server software. Only the client package will be needed by application area (POOL).
  Currently the meetings are organized by POOL. Dirk does not see these issues under his responsibility, therefore more officially organized meetings would be better for him.
• No progress on AMD64 port.

AoB

• Alberto reports that he has received new requests to look at bulletin boards tools (HyperNews) from ATLAS and CMS. He does not know what is the installation and maintenance effort involved in running this kind of services. David would like to have a trial installation to investigate/evaluate these issues, and he adds that if it is going to be useful would need to be coupled to the rest (i.e. Savannah). There is agreement that bulletin boards are much better than plain mailing list. Vincenzo would like to be more concrete and suggests an evaluation service specifically to the HyperNews product. Alberto may need to change to plan to taken this task into account.  He will follow this up.
• Alberto reports about Pacman. This product is used by two experiments (ATLAS and LHCb). SPI has helped the author, Saul Youssef, in various occasions and is currently trying to help to make the necessary modifications to run it on Windows and will produce an evaluation of the work needed. Saul is very collaborative but is not always easy to collaborate due to the lack of an open repository, a bug tracker tool and a clear license for the product. The author is coming at CERN in September and this would be an opportunity to sort out some of the problems. David will check with the corresponding institute what is the exact situation.
• Alberto has received a request to install some Perl modules from ATLAS. This is somehow a bit strange since we do not support Perl in the Applications Area. David will take care.
• Dirk announces that he would like to organize a Workshop for 3D deployment, POOL, COOL in October 20-22.
• Pere suggest to have a summer break in the AF meetings. Next meeting will be 1st September.
   

Summary of the SEAL packages needed by the experiments

This is the summary of the information provided by the experiment architects. Some of the packages (Reflexion, PyLCGDict,...) will not be needed anymore when the migration to Reflex will be in production by the experiments.