Minutes for LArSoft coordination meeting on Jan 29, 2019

Present | Vito Di Benedetto, Lynn Garren, Herb Greenlee, Kyle Knoepfel, Saba Sehrish, Erica Snider|

Remote | Katherine Lato, Paul Russo, Tracy Usher, Anna Mazzacane, Hannah Rogers |

Release and Project status report [Erica Snider]

• An update to nutools, only addresses Physics list, some changes in pandora
• art 3.01.01 will be coming soon, there was a bug

Conclusion:

• Genie v3, no answer yet from experiments

Space Charge Implementation [Hannah Rogers]

• See slides for the details
• these are calibration specific spacecharge changes
• Question by [Lynn] on override Enable and GetCalOffsets on slide 3.
  • [Paul]: this is the standard architecture of services and algorithms; provide common interface and experiments to implement specifics
• ICARUS, LArIAT, ArgoNeut, SBND have not been updated
  • Mike Mooney has a grad student on SBND
  • Hannah will do ICARUS
    • Will also write what needs to change for SBND (not sure if sbnd is using spacecharge)
    • [Noted that SBND is not part of larsoft-users]
• Is it ready to go: dunetpc is not pushed yet, need all branches before making it to the release
  • LArEvt: feature/herogers_voxelizedSCE
  • LArReco: feature/herogers_dxSCE_calibrationCorrection

Conclusion:

• Won't be ready this week because still need to validate changes for dunetpc

Avoid discarding createEngine's returned reference, or "Down with art's getEngine". [Kyle Knoepfel]

• art provides RandomNumberGenerator service

• Proposed changes:
  • Make the compiler issue a warning if the return value of NuRandomService::createEngine() is not used.
  • Make the compiler issue a warning if RandomNumberGenerator::getEngine() is used in art 3.02.00.
  • Remove the function RandomNumberGenerator::getEngine() in art 3.03.00.

• Explanation of Proposal: RandomNumberGenerator::getEngine() is confusing and hard to use properly because it uses the concept of “current module” which is confusing when it is used in a library function that is not directly part of any art module. The concept of "current module" is more confusing when multi-threading is being used and multiple events are being processed on different schedules, in that case you can only talk about the  of a schedule, and the getEngine() function needs to be told which schedule you are referring to.

• The preferred use pattern is to save the returned value from createEngine() as a data member of your class and replace all uses of getEngine() with references to that new data member.

Conclusion:

• The proposal was accepted. Kyle already has feature branches for LArSoft and nutools, and will begin work on feature branches for the experiment-specific code.
• Feature branches already prepared:
  • nutools: feature/knoepfel_nodiscard
  • larsim: feature/knoepfel_nodiscard
  • larreco: feature/knoepfel_nodiscard
  • larana: feature/knoepfel_nodiscard