F.Carminati asked those present about their comments on the off-line week:
Fabrizio: Very useful, especially for the detectors with no people at CERN.
Discussion on the relation between Alice week and Alice off-line
week. The joint weeks have many advantages, but sometimes we could
make it separately. The off-line board should be during the off-line
week, usually at the end. In case it has to propose something for the
agenda, it could be in the beginning. The working groups have to be
organized in a more strict way: task, participants, time, place. The
decision has been taken to hold the offline board in the evening of
the offline day of the ALICE week, which is usually on Monday.
News from PIB, POB, PEB, SC2, EPSFT:
Distribution of the information in form of short reports to the
offline board. Probably this can be done during the off-line day. The
important documents (high level planning, etc) should be circulated to
the offline board before the final approval for reaction.
PIB/POB: The Project overview board had a lot of iterations for its
construction. It contains the managements of the remote centers and
external institutions. This number is very big and cannot operate
easily, but a single member per country faces a problem with the
founding agencies. Final idea: The Project Institution Board will
have this large representativity and will elect 8 members from
regional centres to the POB (no more then one member per country). The
questions about the construction of PIB are still in
discussion. Alberto showed the list of centers involved in Alice
computing. This list has to be distributed for comments and additions.
SC2: Spawns RTags. Alice participated successfully in several RTags. Now
some new ones are coming: event generators, simulation, and "Blue Print".
The "Blue Print" has to decide the main components of the LCG software
(simulation, persistence, visualization, analysis, etc.), and the base
implementation technology for these components. There is some effort dedicated
to this project, and the people need to start the work. For example, a
general simulation RTag has to work on the simulation requirements. These
requirements are mainly related to the physics problems and not only to
the software question.
Root persistence has been adopted by LCG, and Root team will get few
new people to work on. This shows the importance of the participation
in the RTags.
EP/SFT: EP Software team is discussed. The creation of this group
makes sense if we could move the people of ANAPHE, etc. to it, and not
in case all the software groups from the LHC experiments are united
there.
The LCG documentation is available on the Web, but one needs a glossary of
the abbreviations. The most interest in part is the final reports from the
RTags, and not the minutes.
Next meetings:
Off-line week: 09-13/09
Off-line day: 16/09
Off-line board: evening of the off-line day, 16/09
Computing Technical Proposal and planning: Planning is available on
the Web, but has to be updated. It will be in the agenda of the next
off-line week. It has to be a permanent topic (half a day) in the
agenda of offline weeks.
Working groups: One year ago we started some working groups, but some
of them did not work properly for lack of time. Some of the goals were
reached even without WG. The tracking WG is very active. The GRID WG
provided the final document. The planning WG finished a variant of the
planning, but has to follow it permanently. Some questions (High level
triggers, calibration, alignment) probably need a working group. As
far as the detector construction DB the situation was judged not yet
clear. The Warsaw group is supposed to work on, but the communication
with them could be better. This issue has to be brought under control,
otherwise the development may. TPC and TRD have decided to use their
own database without waiting for a common solution. It was felt
appropriate to ask some of the beta testers of Wiktor's system to make
a presentation. Someone from the silicon strip group in Torino could
be a good candidate. The code has to be tested between now and
September and the situation reassessed during the off-line board. The
requirements from the detectors has been given to the Warsaw. The
strip detector is using actively it, pixel and drift not very much.
International Computing Board:
People profile: The number of the CERN core software team should be 17
people. This level has to be maintained and this question has to be
raised to the management board. If CERN is not able to support such a
group, the collaboration has to take actions and provide people from
the outside institutes.
