AF meeting 28 June 2007

Attendees

Stefan Roiser, Gabriele Cosmo, Pere Mato, Oliver Keeble, Marco Cattaneo, Dirk Duellmann, Vincenzo Innocente, Philippe Charpentier

Agenda

• Line management issues (Pere)
• Action items
  
• Issues with DPM, RFIO and GFAL plugins in ROOT
• Configuration partitioning
  
• Status of nightly builds (Stefan)
• Releases status
  
• Experiments feedback
• Platform issues
    . Progress on the MacOSX(Intel) platform
• Topics for future AA meetings
• AoB

version 0 (10/07/07 @ 12:25)

>>>> Please note that these minutes are from memory since the MacBook hard disk storing the notes taken during the meeting developed a problem. Therefore they are very minimal and incomplete <<<<

Line management issues

• Council has approved the additional funds for the LHC operations which will allow SFT to mitigate the reduction of manpower foreseen by 2008.

Action items

• Follow-up MySQL client installation issue reported by ATLAS concerning a hardwired AFS address in the installation (David, Stefan)
  Nothing new on this action.
• Questionnaire about external packages in use (Experiments) 
  Not completed yet by the experiments
• Update the AF mailing list to reflect new LHCb computing project structure (Pere)
  Done.

Issues with DPM, RFIO and GFAL plugins in ROOT

• Results of the tests and any further implementation issues.
• A new patch of ROOT 5.14.00 will be needed for TGFALFile and TRFIOFile to handle URLs of the form: rfio:///castor?path=FILEPATH.

Configuration partitioning

• Any progress in a proposal to separate genuine externals, AA packages and Grid client libraries? 
• LHCb reported that some tests has been done to introduce and extra CMT package in which the actual versions of the Grid client libraries could overwrite the default values in the standard configuration to adapt to evolutions of the status of Grid computing centers well after the software has been released. 
• No concrete proposal has been elaborated for partitioning the genuine external packages from the AA packages in the configuration. 

Nightly build system status update (Stefan)

• New platforms slc4_ia32_gcc41 and slc4_amd64_gcc41 are introduced.
  Currently we are building the "dev1" slot for slc4_ia32_gcc41. Interest was reported to also build on amd64/gcc41. The installation of gcc 4.1 is available from the afs contrib area.
• Windows builds. Piotr is looking into further porting of the nightlies scripts to windows.
  

Releases Status

• Status of the ROOT production release 5.16 (Rene)
  The ROOT production version is not yet released and will be done very soon after few problems has been solved
• Status of the validation of Geant4.9.0 (Gabriele)
  
  • The release is progressing well and will be announced on Friday. 
  • Gabriele confirmed an improvement of about 10% in the CPU performance for EM physics. 
• Status of POOL release (Dirk)
  
  • The tags for version POOL_2_6_0 had been prepared by Marcin Nowak. They will be put in the nightlies as soon as possible.
  • Dirk proposes to retire the packages MySQLCollection, MultiCollection, MySQLltCollection if experiments do not object.
• Status of COOL release (Dirk)
• The new release (COOL_2_2_0) will require a version of CORAL (CORAL_1_9_0) which is going to be put in the nightlies as soon as possible.
• A new configuration LCG_53 is going to be prepared and released in one week.

Experiments feedback

• LHCb
• CMS

Platforms Issues

• MacOSX(intel)
• Installations of osx104_ia32_gcc401 package proceeding well. We need 10 more packages to build in order to have the externals ready to build the LCG project stack.
• New installed s/w packages for all LCG platforms: 
• gccxml 0.7.0_20070615
• cmake 2.4.6
• boost 1.34.0 (using only 60M - installed shared/non-debug/multi-threaded libs only)
• qt 4.3.0
• frontier_client 2.7.3
• We will also install sqlite 3.4.0 for the upcoming LCG configuration.

Topics for future AA meetings

AoB

• Next meeting in two weeks