Core Minutes 7 April 2015

Core Minutes 4/7/2015

Present: Joe Asercion, Joanne Bogart, Jim Chiang, Richard Dubois, Elizabeth Ferrara, Warren Focke, Tom Glanzman, Heather Kelly, David Landriu,

ScienceTools: (Jim) There have been several recent updates:
- Various package updates have been necessary because of the new wcslib and healpix externals.
- Tagged fixes to astro made by Michael Kuss for IGRF-12.
- The routine loading of all IRF files at initialization was slowing things down. He changed to a lazy evaluation scheme: only fetch files if and when they're needed.
A new ST, incorporating these changes (and also, unavoidably, use of the new wcslib and healpix externals) will be available soon. (Richard) Will FSSC use this for Pass8? (Jim) No, they'll use the version of ST they're testing now.

See Science Tools Development Notes for current activity.
FSSC: (Joe) Still in testing cycle for new release. Should be ready around early May.
Reprocessing: (Tom) Still holding up on the backfill. Will re-evaluate in a day or two.
Hardware: (Tom) Last week there were episodes of stress of various kinds. Things are better now. gpfs is on its way; hopefully will help. (Richard) Tom noticed several users running 1000 jobs or more — and most likely without taking much care to tune them properly. We're thinking of limiting users to at most 500 jobs.
Core talk:
- GR news (Heather) She'll make a new release tag in order to be consistent with the new ST; that is, use the same versions of packages such as astro which are in both. She'll wait until the new ST is out.
  
  Work on tip, cfitsio, etc. is still in progress. The new ST and GR tags will not wait for it.
- Externals (Heather) She'll rebuild the rhel5 32-bit version of the new healpix library to be sure that the fPIC flag is used. Since it's brand-new, everyone (everyone who might possibly care, that is) agreed that it would make sense to just replace the existing build.
- Mac builds (Heather) Now has a working mac running Mountain Lion so can make the new wcslib and healpix libraries on that machine, easier than doing it remotely. (Richard and/or Jim) Mountain Lion is increasingly passé. (Joe) FWIW, the FSSC wont be supporting Mountain Lion this release (Richard) Should we upgrade our Mac to Yosemite rather than trying to get RM going in a VM on a Mountain Lion machine? (Joanne) That would help somewhat since currently I can't even start the VM from the command line. But there still is a lot of work to be done to get RM running there, or even just to build all the externals.

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