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Software Consolidation Tasks B . Hegner (for the CERN PH/SFT group)

Software Consolidation Tasks B . Hegner (for the CERN PH/SFT group) Preparation for ECFA HL-LHC Workshop 17- 7 -2013. The Context. Thinking about the future of SW in the next 10 to 20 years we will be challenged by Increasing processing demand Increasing parallelism in hardware

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Software Consolidation Tasks B . Hegner (for the CERN PH/SFT group)

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  1. Software Consolidation Tasks B. Hegner (for the CERN PH/SFT group) Preparation for ECFA HL-LHC Workshop 17-7-2013

  2. The Context Thinking about the future of SW in the next 10 to 20 years we will be challenged by • Increasing processing demand • Increasing parallelism in hardware • Uncertainty of production platforms Bigger problems means our software must become simpler if we want to be able to solve them!

  3. Making software simpler Rule #1 of simpler software: Only consider functionality that is really needed Rule #2 of simpler software: Only provide functionality if it isn’t covered otherwise already Rule #3 of simpler software: Don’t try to be smarter than you actually are Rule #4 of simpler software: Re-assure from time to time on #1, #2 and #3

  4. Evolution of Languages • A lot of high energy physics software projects are still in their 1st iteration with OOP and C++ • The standard library, Boost and other libraries evolved since then • Following the evolution is a pre-requisite to stay future-proof • Transition to C++11 started • C++14, C++17, etc to come • E.g. major investment in ROOT 6.0 • Transition to Python 3.0 rather slow • Will that ever fly in our community? • We should systematically review whether the approaches we chose are still state-of-the-art

  5. Review existing code-base • LHC software is now > 15 years old • Evolution of requirements since initial design • Thread-safety wasn’t on the radar for a long time • How many other requirement changes are there? • With present LHC experience the requirements are much clearer than before • Common understanding allows us to set up common projects • One common project emerging is the share of physics validation infrastructure • SW designers will be gone by HL-LHC, so knowledge preservation is a concern • Fix now everything that can be/ has to be fixed • And document everything else! • We should have a review of our libraries and should not limit ourselves when • Refactoring code for thread-safety • Changing interfaces to make them long-term maintainable • Deprecating functionality • Such reviews should not be a one-time effort, but translate into baseline activities • E.g. Geant4 relies on and does regular review, update and removal of physics models

  6. Focus on Core Competencies HEP traditionally has a strong do-it-yourself attitude • … even within experiments! Core competencies of our community are I/O, statistical analysis and simulation • Need to parallelize them from the ground up Other important needs of our community need to be addressed as well • mathematical operations (e.g. VDT) • physics data structures (e.g. SoA vs. AoS) • tracking and clustering (e.g. fastjet) • experiment frameworks (e.g. GaudiHive) We have to focus and invest with common projects in these fields

  7. Software Validation • Testing and validation has ever been a core part of HEP software development • Our workflow is different from other communities • Importance for validation increases • May need to support another major production platform • Multithreaded reproducibility is much more complex • Profiling tools essential • First rule of optimization: know where to optimize! • We should use more standards in the community! • igProf could be such a standard • Validation tools • We ought to be able to have a common project among experiments!

  8. Portability and Preservation • We need to facilitate the transition to new platforms and resources • Virtualization technology can help • Separate hardware and software update cycles • Versioned SW distribution a viable solution for long term environment preservation • E.g. CernVM for Na49/NA61 • Provides out-of-the-box solution for clouds • Validated environment can be cloned basically everywhere

  9. Dealing with Bugs • Don’t let bugs enter the software in the first place • Better training of the community • Test-driven development • Important for platform migrations as well • Spot bugs early on • Run-time testing and validation • Static code analysis • Make debugging easier • What are good tools for multi-threaded debugging? We should seriously consider investing more here!

  10. Conclusions • Problems are getting bigger • Let’s make software simpler! • Functional requirements much clearer than for LHC • We have to make debugging, validation and profiling easier • Invest in common tools and knowledge • We have to consolidate existing code base • Languages and external libraries evolved • Fix for ‘outdated’ decisions now • Review of software projects • We should dare refactoring things! • We have to consolidate on functionality • What are the core needs of the community? • We should dare deprecating things! • We have to consolidate on knowledge • Use more standards • Extend training for community

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