Architects’ Forum Minutes, March 15

Present: Graeme Stewart, Michal Simon, Marco Clemencic, Pere Mato, Jakob Blomer, Gabriele Cosmo, Ed Moyse, David Lange, Andre Sailer, Patricia Mendez, Benedikt Hegner

Excused: Charles Delort, Marco Cattaneo

Line Management Issues

• Summer students - 8 Member State projects of the first round, 3 for the second round (NMS) and 1 OpenLab

• Arrivals

  • 1 DOCT (Stefan Wunch) with Lorenzo in TVMA

  • 1 TECH (MOSCIATTI Simone) with Jakob for CernVM

• LD for ATLAS librarian

  • Board being organized for the beginning of April

• Program of work presentations/discussions

  • 5,12,19 March for simulation, CernVM and services, and ROOT (https://indico.cern.ch/category/266/)

  • Everybody is invited to the meetings - ask Pere if you don’t get the SFT group meeting invitations

• EP R&D

  • Workshop tomorrow (https://indico.cern.ch/event/696066/)

• IT R&D

  • Advisory to IT management for R&D projects in the context of OpenLab and Techlab. Resources, priorities , ensure that R&D activities are properly documented, etc.

  • The composition is experiments computing coordinators, SFT group leader and leaders of the various IT groups/projects

Report from the LIM Meeting

• LCG_93 has been released (also with Python 3). Some issues for LHCb, but think they are all solved.

  • Binutils is still a “manual” extra installation in this release..

• For LCG_94 RPM dependencies on binutils will be included to automate the whole process (used by ATLAS).

  • LCG_94 will wait for the next ROOT release (Pere thinks there is a patch release coming soon)

• New davix requested by ATLAS for LCG_88.

• Workshop being organised (May, June - Doodle: https://doodle.com/poll/wx98gxehz3vmc4aa) to gather input from the experiments about their needs in a bit more depth than can be gathered in the LIM itself.

  • This will help define the longer term strategy.

    • 2-3 year roadmap.

  • You are all invited.

  • Link to HSF activities.

• Clang 5.0 requested by LHCb. Causes a lot of failures right now in dev3 -> following up.

Status of Projects

• CERNVM

  • Appliance release 3.7 is in the pipeline. Currently being tested internally. Will go to public testing next week. Needed for kernel upgrade for CERNVM 3.

  • CVMFS 2.5 release well in hand. 25 smaller issued to be resolved.

    • Will support multi-transactions.

  • Improved backup strategy being developed with IT.

• Simulation

  • New patch release 10.4p1. CMS wanted this, but went to production with 10.4 anyway. LHCb needed custom optical properties (was removed by mistake in 10.4). Supports C++17 (needs CMake 3.8). Work plan is now available. Will be discussed in 10 April G4 Technical Forum.

• Persistency

  • Charles - nothing to report for CORAL and COOL.

• ROOT

  • No report.

Experiments’ Feedback

• ALICE

  • Nothing to report.

• LHCb

  • Nothing special to report.

• ATLAS

  • Nothing more to report.

• CMS

  • Nothing more to report. Finalising data taking releases.

• CLIC

  • Minor issues with G4 10.4. Had to adapt to a change of CMake variable for CLHEP.

    • Was not seen in LCG builds.

• IT

  • IT TUM 28 May. Q. Are other linux distros being considered? Only CentOS7.5. No other distributions being considered (has 10 year LTS).

    • Better support for ARM64 architectures seems to be the only active request (this means puppet and other supporting services).

• HSF

  • Naples workshop in just over 1 week. Well prepared, looking forward to many discussions about the development plans for the next decade.

AOB

• Next meeting 5 April.