Software Parallel Intro

1. Software Parallel Intro • Focus this CM continues to be on needs for analysis of data and use of G4MICE online (e.g. reconstruction in the control room). • Only 4 talks today as several of the key players in the software group were unable to attend, but they cover most of the relevant range of topics: • Work towards a G4MICE Online Reconstruction application. • TOF Reconstruction improvements. • Update on the Database. • Update on the GRID. M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

2. What We Won’t Hear • Tom Roberts started to work on a control room UI to streamline operations in the MICE control room at the last CM. • Unfortunately he has found it impossible to work on this remotely, and so no substantial progress has been made on this task (any volunteers to take it?). • The growing contingent of Bulgarian software experts (Mariyan, Vassil & Yordan) continue to do lots of good work and have been upgrading the unpacking library that G4MICE and the Online Monitor use as well as adding a class to deal with flash ADC hits and finding and fixing bugs in the existing G4MICE DATE related code. M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

3. Please Note • While this session has a lot of time for discussion, which is actively encouraged, the software group will not be making any changes or decisions solely on the basis of discussions at meetings any more. • Instead, we will require written documentation to support any new use cases or new or modified requirements from the experiment or any changes in policy with regards focus, priority or any other directions that may come to the group from the rest of the experiment. M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

4. Software Schools • Last year several software schools were held which were intended to take someone through enough C++ and G4MICE to enable them to perform their own simulations, create their own models and do their own analyses of Monte Carlo and/or real data. • The informal feedback I’ve received (feel free to correct me from the audience!) is that these have been useful and my observation is that everyone who has attended and completed these courses has then been in a good position to start doing real work with G4MICE on their area of interest. • I am very happy to continue to run these, so please let me know if you are interested! M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

5. Software Workshops • Very successful workshop was held at RAL to coincide with the arrival of TOF1. • We welcomed another new student from Oxford and saw most of the regulars attend, which was great. • I would like to continue these every couple of months at RAL (although I can’t attend for all of every day due to teaching, we now have a sufficiently large set of experts that I don’t think this is an issue). • Each software workshop will be focussed on a few specific items that need to be worked on. • Can be combined with a software school if there is interest. M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

6. Testing & Releases • Several problems have emerged recently that would have been discovered earlier and fixed before they caused quite as much pain to people if we had a proper testing and release system in place as originally planned. • The lack of regular releases of stable tested incremental updates also means that the version of G4MICE on the GRID, while good, is lagging behind the development. • For this, we really need someone who can spend a little time each week running through the tests and helping me make releases. • Any volunteers? M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

7. Move to version 2.x • Still has not happened, mostly due to problems shown on previous slide. • We clearly have at least one new external library (PostGreS) and the desire to update to a newer compiler and newer versions of CLHEP and GEANT4 which implies some changes to the existing code (thankfully the more frequent upgrades of the unpacking library have a much smaller effect on the G4MICE side). • I would like to see this happen before the software review if at all possible (also to be able to demonstrate at least 2 correctly executed release cycles before the review!). M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

8. Documentation • Continues to be developed at a much slower pace than the code. • Good work has been done by a few people (e.g. Rogers and Rayner) to update stuff that I last looked at years ago. • With a software review coming very soon (exact date to be determined but in the next few months I would guess), we should use this as an incentive to get our documentation sorted out. M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

9. Phone Meetings • Phone Meetings had been suspended, but I think they will need to restart so that everyone can stay better connected and in particular we can keep track of progress in the lead up to the review and the resumption of data taking in the spring. • I will send an email around requesting availability at various times (so far it looks most likely to be afternoon in Europe as we have US participation in G4MICE but currently none from Asia), but feel free to pre-empt this and email me your suggestions! • I would like to have them weekly, but keep them short (30-45 minutes max). M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009

10. General Moan and Conclusions • We still have a lot of important service tasks (e.g. testing, documentation, writing lower level code that supports a particular detector or general feature needed in G4MICE) that continue to remain unfinished because they are not immediately seen as being “physics” and so as most of our effort is in the form of students and post-docs, they are discouraged from doing this work. • Possibly this will change with the formation of the new online group, however it would be nice if less resistance would be felt when I try to assign such tasks to people. • Anyway – on to the talks... M.Ellis - CM23 - Harbin - 15th January 2009