Core Minutes 9 August 2011

Core Minutes 8/9/2011

Present: Anders Borgland, Toby Burnett, Jim Chiang, Richard Dubois, Elizabeth Ferrara, Warren Focke, Tom Glanzman, Elizabeth Hays, Heather Kelly, Julie McEnery, Leon Rochester, Tom Stephens, Eric Winter

ScienceTools: (Jim) Two bug fixes have been applied to Likelihood. New tag: Likelihood-17-14-03. A new ST release is planned for the end of the week. It should include the move to Python 2.7.1.
FSSC: (Eric W.) Quiet week with work continuing on the P7 release documentation.
Documentation: Elizabeth Ferrara asked about the status of the LAT perfomance web page, which is currently only available via Microsoft Essentials. Richard reported that a new unix web space is being set up by Tom G. Riccardo, Leon, and Luca Baldini will be among those with permissions to modify the pages.
Tony's plans to set up a unix web space which will be automatically updated based on CVS updates to the workbook is on hold until Tony returns from vacation. In the meantime, there are pending updates to the workbook which will be applied to the windows web server location.
There has also been a question concerning handling the new P7 documentation available at the FSSC website. We plan to create a new workbook page that will point to the FSSC locations.
Computing Resources: (Richard) The sulky45 situation was summarized. Over the weekend it was up and down 3 to 4 times affecting the L1 processing. L1proc had fallen 10 to 15 hours behind. Warren reports that they are now caught up. At the time of the meeting, the root cause was still unclear, but some symptoms had been noted. The fileserver was 87% full and M.E. cleared out 30% of it. Tom G. further commented that there was a full reboot and diagnostics performed. Since the meeting, sulky45's memory has been increased from 4 to 16 GB. There are also discussions of migrating to a thumper, once the current problem is better understood.

Tapes - We ordered 1500 tapes. 1000 for P7 reprocessing. If we don't reprocess, we may butt up against install of 5 TB tapes/drives. These cannot write to 1 TB tags. But don't know when the 1 TB drives will vanish.

Fileservers - all are here and being installed. We have 7 to give back, and in order will go to KIPAC, BABAR then CD. CD also agreed to take back two of our 16 TB servers instead of their 32 TB ones.
Pass8: (Leon) GR v19r3p1 is out. There is a problem in reconstruction being discussed between Bill and Tracy. Ordering the tracks by the CAL cluster that they point to just shifts the burden from the tracker to the CAL, and that's probably premature. A workaround may be coming soon.
Pass7 reprocessing: (Leon) Work continues on updating the calibrations. Leon has been looking at the TKR calibrations and checking the Min. ionizing peak from the start and end of the runs, and found they haven't changed much. Sasha is working on CAL calibrations. Richard asked if there was some operational plan for doing full reprocessing. Leon responded that the steps would involve creating a reprocessing task, then running some to see how they compare with the merit reprocessing. Then rerun some with updated calibrations and see how much of a change results. Finally someone would have to decide if it is worth it.
Event displays: (Leon) Dima has returned from vacation and has traced the issue of the geometry being invisible staring with the 2nd event to the heprep Jas3 interface. Apparently the change was applied to the code to address a bug, heprep Issue #133. Unfortunately, the bug tracking system has disappeared. Dima may have a workaround. When the dust settles, Leon hopes we can make wired more widely available, as it is greatly imprvoved.
Core talk:
- Windows SSH woes (Heather) Windows CMT RM seems to be up and running again, not so sure about the windows SCons RM. Moving the HOME environment variable was not very successful. Instead, we did make the known_hosts file read-only. This should be ok. While the known_hosts file is sometimes updated, for it to work successfully would require manual intervention anyhow. We can do that by hand when it becomes necessary. In the meantime, known_hosts has not disappeared, it seems, since being set read-only.
- Skimmer problems (Tom G.) After working with David Chamont, it seems the problems are no longer problems. JIRA SK-41, which
- GRBAnalysis (Jim) No news, waiting on Nicola.
- SCons Windows builds (Tom S.) The windows builds continually fail. Tom believes this may be to due to an incorrectly set environment variable for MySQL. He will try fixing this later today.
- Virtual Machines and RM Toby provided and overview of what he has in mind. Where he envisions a VM where he could install ST via single file. Tom S. went on to explain that he has been playing with VirtualBox and has a version that emulates RHEL5-64 with ST 09-24-00 installed. The resulting file is 1.6 GB. This includes a bare bones OS with ST installed. In VirtualBox, you can set up the VM to access your local hard drive to access files. Getting the RM to automatically create these files will involve some work, but Tom has worked out the mechanics of manually creating the VM "appliance". We would have to sort out what flavors of OS we intend to support.
  
  Since the meeting, Tom has made his VM of ST available and written up a Confluence page: Science Tools Virtual Machine Appliance

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