Summary of HEPiX Wrap-Up Meeting, CERN, 29th Sep 92
Summary of HEPiX Wrap-Up Meeting, CERN, 29th Sep 92
===================================================
Following discussions held at the CHEP92 (Computers in High Energy
Physics) meeting in Annecy and during the two days of the HEPiX meeting
in CERN September 28th and 29th, it has been decided to restructure HEPiX
along the following lines.
In future, specific groups will be established to target specific areas
and named coordinators will be sought for each group. In addition, we
will form regional chapters for HEPiX, initially one European and the
other North American. Other areas may follow later as interest builds
up; in the meantime, interested parties in such areas are welcome to
attach themselves to whichever chapter they prefer and will be invited to
participate in any activities they wish in either chapter. The volunteer
coordinators in these chapters will be jointly responsible for the
general organisation of HEPiX and its working groups.
With regard to meetings, it was agreed to try to hold at least one
regional meeting per year and a full world-wide meeting once every 12 to
18 months. The final decision between 12 and 18 months will be taken at
the first regional meetings next Spring. The choice is between an annual
worldwide meeting and a meeting to coincide with the CHEP schedule which
has now been set at 18 months between meetings.
The first regional meetings should be targetted for Spring 1993, one in
Europe and one in the US or Canada. Although regional in scope,
interested institutes will be free to send people to either, or both. In
addition, some effort will be made by each chapter to send at least one
representative to the other's meeting. At that time, the coordinators
will decide, based on such aspects as interest level, on whether to
schedule a second set of regional meetings for late 1993 and hold the
next worldwide conference around the time of CHEP94 (planned for Spring
'94 in the San Francisco area) or whether to advance this larger meeting
to Fall 1993.
The various groups, their target areas, and the people responsible for
each are as follows ---
European Coordination
---------------------
Alan Silverman, CERN, E-mail - ALAN@VXCERN.CERN.CH
North American Coordination
---------------------------
Judy Nicholls, FNAL, E-mail - NICHOLLS@FNAL.FNAL.GOV
Common HEP UNIX Environment
---------------------------
It was agreed that it would be useful to study if some form of common
working environment could be produced among HEP UNIX sites. This could
ease the life of physicists who migrate among the labs and the
Universities as well as assist UNIX administrators in providing some
guidelines. What constitutes the environment is not fully defined
(shell, startup scripts, environment variables, window interface, tools,
etc, etc). Whether some useful consensus can actually be achieved is
also open to question; we may be too late in defining this, too much
history out there; different sites may have vastly different constraints.
Nevertheless, an attempt will be made. It was emphasised that whatever
results, if any, will not be compulsory and not necessarily the default
environment. The idea is simply to produce something that works across
multiple platforms and is available if so desired by migratory users and
others.
The initial work will be coordinated by Wolfgang Friebel, DESY, E-mail
friebel@ifh.de with help from John Gordon, RAL, E-mail jcg@ib.rl.ac.uk
and Alan Silverman, CERN, E-mail ALAN@VXCERN.CERN.CH. Evaluations of
their results should be performed by different sites, both large and
small, and Rochelle Lauer, Yale, E-mail lauer@yalehep.bitnet has already
offered help.
Documentation Collections
-------------------------
The idea of this exercise is to make available to HEPiX members all
documentation on the use of UNIX in HEP which might be of interest. Such
documentation will NOT be collected in a central site, it being accepted
that it would be continually out of date. Instead, a central registry
will be built up consisting of pointers. This registry will be made
available worldwide via the use of WWW. The work will be coordinated by
Judy Richards, CERN, E-mail JUDY@CERNVM.CERN.CH.
Tools Database
--------------
Similar to the previous group, this will consist of a set of pointers to
UNIX- based tools and utilities which are of particular interest to HEP
users. Once again, the tools themselves will not be stored centrally,
only the pointers. Along with these pointers, the group may try to
solicit reviews, hints, critiques, etc. And once again the database will
be made available via WWW and FREEHEP. Carrie Kost promised to try to
seed the database with a list of tools used at TRIUMF; his E-mail address
is kost@erich.triumf.ca. After the meeting, Robert Bruen, MIT, E-mail
Bruen@MITLNS.MIT.EDU, offered to try to coordinate this group. MICHAEL
OGG of CARLETON University, Ottawa, E-mail ogg@physics.carleton.ca, had
already offered during CHEP92 to try to find someone to help.
NQS Extensions
--------------
It had been made clear during CHEP92 that many sites had independently
produced enhancements to the basic NQS package. John O'Neall, IN2P3,
E-mail jon@frcpn11.in2p3.fr offered to study if some merging could be
performed.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
--------------------------------
>From our experiences during the first year of HEPiX, it is clear that we
need to publicise ourselves more. It was agreed that we will use both
the existing USENET news group (HEPNET.HEPIX) and the existing E-mail
distribution list (HEPIX@HEPNET.HEP.NET) since not every interested
member uses one or the other. Alan Silverman and Judy Richards have
agreed to produce an FAQ about HEPiX which they will try to keep up to
date and publish at regular intervals, approximately monthly. (Although
not able to be present to agree at the time, we hope Judy Nicholls will
also provide input for the FAQ.)
The meeting closed with a plea by the organisers of the various groups
for aid in whatever way seemed appropriate - offers of talks at meetings,
lists of documentation and tools, tools reviews, input and suggestions
for a common environment, etc. Finally, the meeting gave a warm vote of
thanks to Judy Richards who had arranged the two-day CERN meeting so
successfully.
Alan Silverman
14 October 1992
--
Alan Silverman
UNIX Workstation Support Manager