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From: Pere.Mato@cern.ch
Date: 4/14/00
Time: 1:49:19 PM
Remote Name: 137.138.142.33
LHCb got a list of further questions from the software panel of the LHC computing review. These questions need to be answered in written by the 30th on April. I am appending the questions in this mail. I have attached to each question the name of who should feel responsible of providing the first draft answer. All comments and suggestions are welcome. Pere Questions to all experiments and CERN/IT 1. What are your expectations and recommendations how to optimize the use of common software products and solutions for more than one experiment? How should the various phases of a potential 'project' be started, resourced at the appropriate level, how should management oversight be structured and what kind of regular interaction would be helpful? (==>John Harvey) 2. Please comment on the idea of software agreements and MOU's, what granularity of responsibility you would recommend, how should the resources be shared? (==>John Harvey) 3. Please provide more detailed plans on ? project task breakdown ? resource loaded schedules and milestones ? resource profiles up to 2005, especially personnel (including an estimate on software professionals and physicists ? contributing to software effort) ? estimate of incremental people (e.g. for 2006) How many people contributed to software development in 1999 and 2000? How much increase of resources are you planning for the future? (==>John Harvey) 4. What is criteria for accepting a new third party package into the experiments software system? (==>Pere Mato) Questions/Requests for all Experiments 1. Please formulate a statement expressing the experiment's requests for the future evolution of the GEANT4 collaboration and project. Explain how this will meet your needs for validation, further development and ongoing support. (==>Florence Ranjard, Vanya Belyaev, Gonzalo Gracia) 2. What part do you expect/hope to play in the evaluation of the results of Espresso and the decision process for what should be done about providing a common Object Storage solution for one or more LHC experiments? (==>Pere Mato) 3. Please provide a brief statement of what you would consider to be the scope and deliverables for a common project aimed at a Geometry Description system. What would be your goals in participating in such a common project and what roles would you be prepared to play? (==>Rado Chytracek, Pere Mato) 4. As a result of participating in this software panel, where your representatives have heard details of work going on in all of the other LHC experiments, have you ? identified any new areas of commonality? ? formulated any opinions on what forums would encourage continuing dialogue and interchange of ideas and software between experiments? ? identified any areas where your experiment could/should use software authored by one of the other experiments or IT division? ? identified any new concerns or areas of risk? (==>Suggestions from everybody) 5. Data Management has to be as an engineered system, it involves a component of a program framework, the bookkeeping and logging databases, the hardware systems and networks, and the interactions of the different parts. It involves machines/disks/robots/tapes/networks and be subject to the wider effects of transaction management and sharing of certain central resources. Who is designing this system and how are the responsibilities of the different aspects of the data management and data handling distributed? How are these people interacting with those determining the framework, architecture, and persistency mechanisms? How are you ensuring that the broader overall data management system will be carefully designed and will function well? Which role do you expect from CERN/IT? (==> Pere Mato) 6. How big is the participation of physicists from the collaboration on software development? How are you trying to control unnecessary duplication of software developments? (==>John Harvey) 7. Do you consider that the "traditional architecture" can not cope with the LHC-detector and experiment complexity? Why? What the architecture has to do with the complexity of the collaboration? (==>Pere Mato) 8. Is your architecture flexible enough to allow the co-existence of "action on demand" and "explicit invocation" in the same application? (==>Pere Mato) 9. Does your persistency solution restrict you on what classes you might use to implement a given physics module? (==> Markus Frank) 10. Within your architecture, are you able to migrate a physics module from the reconstruction environment to the trigger environment (event filter)? Is the event data presented to the event filter algorithm in the same format? (==>Pere Mato) 11. Would you be ready to support other experiments using your tools? Would the experiments be able to come with new requirements? Do you think it is possible to have a common tool supported by CERN/IT? (==>John Harvey) Questions/Requests for LHCb 1. Has LHCb had any external review of its Architecture and Framework to establish the cost and risks of using such a general and open approach? Are there any estimates of the performance costs, development time costs, and potential debugging costs associated with the approach? (==>Pere Mato) 2. If LHCb is really prepared to 'use what is provided' as a common solution for data persistency (and indeed a data management system) how will you be assured that it will meet your needs? Are your requirements for a data management system formulated and written down? What will be the process to come to a list of requirements to decide on the persistency solution ? (Same as question 2 to all experiments, ==>Pere Mato) 3. Given the architectural choices of LHCb what constraints will be put on a decision to use Java? Will the experiment establish some rules or guidance for language choices, persistency choices and scripting language choices? (==>Pere Mato, Stefan Probst) 4. Do you believe that your choice(s) for data persistency will place constraints on your analysis tools and if so what will that mean for the experiment? (==>Gloria Corti) 5. How do you foresee to maintain consistency across persistent objects stored in different technologies? (==> Markus Frank) 6. How do you plan to support schema evolution and maintain the converters used? (==>Markus Frank)