Color code: (critical, news during the meeting: green, news from this week: blue, news from last week: purple, no news: black)
High priority Framework issues:
- Fix dropping lifetime::timeframe for good: Still pending: problem with CCDB objects getting lost by DPL leading to "Dropping lifetime::timeframe", saw at least one occation during SW validation.
- Newly spotted bogus message about decreased oldestPossible counter should be suppressed. Status?
- Start / Stop / Start: 2 problems on O2 side left:
-
- All processes are crashing randomly (usually ~2 out of >10k) when restarting. Stack trace hints to FMQ. https://its.cern.ch/jira/browse/O2-4639
- TPC ITS matching QC crashing accessing CCDB objects. Not clear if same problem as above, or a problem in the task itself:
- Stabilize calibration / fix EoS: New scheme: https://its.cern.ch/jira/browse/O2-4308: Reported 2 issues to GIulio, waiting for a fix.
- Fix problem with ccdb-populator: no idea yet - since Ole left, someone else will have to take care.
Global calibration topics:
- TPC IDC and SAC workflow issues to be reevaluated with new O2 at restart of data taking. Cannot reproduce the problems any more.
Sync reconstruction
- Waiting for RC to test COSMIC replay data set.
- Waiting for RC to test STOP timeout impact.
- Several software updates with cherry-pick of detector code and new QC versions.
Async reconstruction
- Remaining oscilation problem: GPUs get sometimes stalled for a long time up to 2 minutes. Checking 2 things:
- does the situation get better without GPU monitoring? --> Inconclusive
- We can use increased GPU processes priority as a mitigation, but doesn't fully fix the issue.
- ḾI100 GPU stuck problem will only be addressed after AMD has fixed the operation with the latest official ROCm stack.
- Limiting factor for pp workflow is now the TPC time series, which is to slow and creates backpressure (costs ~20% performance on EPNs). Enabled multi-threading as recommended by Matthias - need to check if it works.
- Problem reported by Max/Ruben that analysis fails, since sometimes at EOR we receive TFs with no data and bogus orbit.
- Giulio will implement tf-status message (from https://github.com/AliceO2Group/AliceO2/pull/13495) sent by readout-proxy.
EPN major topics:
- Fast movement of nodes between async / online without EPN expert intervention.
- 2 goals I would like to set for the final solution:
- It should not be needed to stop the SLURM schedulers when moving nodes, there should be no limitation for ongoing runs at P2 and ongoing async jobs.
- We must not lose which nodes are marked as bad while moving.
- Interface to change SHM memory sizes when no run is ongoing. Otherwise we cannot tune the workflow for both Pb-Pb and pp: https://alice.its.cern.ch/jira/browse/EPN-250
- Lubos to provide interface to querry current EPN SHM settings - ETA July 2023, Status?
- Improve DataDistribution file replay performance, currently cannot do faster than 0.8 Hz, cannot test MI100 EPN in Pb-Pb at nominal rate, and cannot test pp workflow for 100 EPNs in FST since DD injects TFs too slowly. https://alice.its.cern.ch/jira/browse/EPN-244 NO ETA
- DataDistribution distributes data round-robin in absense of backpressure, but it would be better to do it based on buffer utilization, and give more data to MI100 nodes. Now, we are driving the MI50 nodes at 100% capacity with backpressure, and then only backpressured TFs go on MI100 nodes. This increases the memory pressure on the MI50 nodes, which is anyway a critical point. https://alice.its.cern.ch/jira/browse/EPN-397
- TfBuilders should stop in ERROR when they lose connection.
- Allow epn user and grid user to set nice level of processes: https://its.cern.ch/jira/browse/EPN-349
- Tentative time for ALMA9 deployment: december 2024.
Other EPN topics:
Full system test issues:
Topology generation:
- Deployed a workaround in O2DPG GenTopo, to delete repository and check out anew if this happens. To be seen if this fixes it fully.
AliECS related topics:
- Extra env var field still not multi-line by default.
GPU ROCm / compiler topics:
- ROCm 6.2.2 available from AMD, old problems seem fixed, but we see 2 new types of crashes
- GPU memory error : no update
- Server crash: AMD needs serial cosonsole access to check for kernel messages since the server just disappears, hope this helps.
- New miscompilation for >ROCm 6.0
- Waiting for AMD to fix the reproducer we provided (not yet fixed in 6.2.2, but we have a workaround).
- Try to find a better solution for the problem with __device__ inline functions leaking symbols in the host code.
- Created PR to bump GCC to 14.2 (just to test).
- GCC14 PR now gree despite CUDA problem in FullCI, now have to wait for new CUDA version.
TPC GPU Processing
- WIP: Use alignas() or find a better solution to fix alignment of monte carlo labels: https://its.cern.ch/jira/browse/O2-5314
- Waiting for TPC to fix bogus TPC transformations for good, then we can revert the workaround.
- Waiting for TPC to check PR which uses full cluster including average charge and occupancy map errors during seeding.
TPC processing performance regression:
- Final solution: merging transformation maps on the fly into a single flat object: Still WIP
General GPU Processing