Core Minutes 6/24/2014

• ScienceTools: (Jim) Since the last report in mid-May there has been a new ST release, 09-33-03. Most updates have been in support of Pass8: improved PSF sampling, IRFs, and so forth. Some of this work is still ongoing and will show up in a future release.

  See Science Tools Development Notes for details.

• FSSC: (Joe) No news this week. He's wondering when external upgrades happen. In particular, there are newer versions of ape and cfitsio. (Heather) typically waits for a request. (Jim) is in favor of upgrading if there are newer versions which FSSC prefers. (Joe) will email version information.

• Reprocessing: (Tom G.) Pass8 backfill is done through April, 2014.

• Group skims: (Tom G.) A pilot project to allow science analysis groups r/w access to a part of the xroot system has started. Initially, the Catalog group has stored monthly skims of the new Pass8 FITS files and the CRE group has a set of its own skims. This scheme requires some changes to allow different groups to have r/w access to their directory trees. Wilko is helping to implement. If the pilot is successful, more 'group data' is expected to move to xroot where access is spread across dozens of servers rather than just wain025.

• Hardware and such: (Richard) Our request for two new 250 Tbyte file servers is in. One may be configured as a gpfs server (pilot project). We've been told that xrootd can be layered on gpfs, as can nfs. (Tom) However, for most users, gpfs will already look a lot like nfs. There could be differences in file protection mechansims (as there are between nfs and afs).

  (Richard) There have been problems recently with user disk. There will be an outage soon to replace the SP (System Processor). (Tom) There were two episodes. One was simply overloading. The other had to do with creation of a lot of core files, which caused the disk to tank. The System Processor is used by system people to get at the machine without resorting to ethernet, useful when certain kinds of problems crop up. The plan is to coordinate the outage to replace it with an upcoming Oracle outage, probably in August.

• Pass8: (Leon) No C & A meeting this weekend. Pass8 activity has been primarily in analysis, outside his (Leon's) realm.

• Core talk:

  • Event displays (Heather) still has WIRED on her plate; that is, getting it to go on fermilnx07. Hoping it's just a job options thing. Fred is still working, so no reason to drop it.

  • Skimmer (Tom) The skimmer is having trouble with new (Pass8) merit files. It (or some component closely associated with it) doesn't recognize all the columns in the new files. (Richard) could there be a problem with bit handling of event classes? (Tom) will try to set up a stand-alone run and investigate problems, if any.

  • Mountain Lion and Installer (Joanne) As of last meeting, Eric C. was unable to fetch a Mountain Lion release with command line installer because the externals were missing. The immediate fix — creating a missing directory on u35 — was not sufficient since RM running on the mac only knew that the tarred externals existed locally, not that the copy to u35 had failed. At Tom S's suggestion I deleted the local files, but then discovered that Jenkins had ceased running on that machine, so new builds were stuck. This was due to a recent reboot of the machine. Jenkins does not restart automatically (separate problem which I hope to address with Tony J when he returns from Hawaii). But after restarting Jenkins manually according to Tony's recipe, everything worked as advertised: builds completed successfully, externals were regenerated and successfully copied to u35. We still don't know if command line installer works with these files; Eric hasn't had a chance to try it. There is a separate, known problem with the gui installer and mac externals, yet to be tracked down.

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