Tasks in S&C

If you are an enthusiastic junior and intend to fulfill your service task duties as defined by our publication policy, please contact the S&C Leader directly for any of the tasks below. Also, please make sure to specify your current skills and what you would like to do, learn and acquire as new skills. Some of those tasks will have a point of contact - please refer to the table for more details.

You may also consider serving as embedding helper or deputy or attend to long term services such as being a Software sub-system coordinator or maintaining the analysis IO layers (MuDST  and picoDST). Just ask what are the opened position in those maintenance categories. We not only welcome your help but rely on it as the S&C team does not have a growth model built-in (it does not grow with number of participants, number of sub-systems, number of components or number of years of data to support). We can only do more with YOUR help.

Title, affected area, task description & goal	Skill required	POC	Taker or assignee	Status (date)
Title: Evaluate the use of XCache as an possible improvement over Xrootd access. Affected area: user analysis Task description: Xrootd access has recently been improved by reducing the IO operation per second (very much like access to GPFS): entire files are transferred to local disk and read locally. Why was this done? This was done as the Xrootd storage model has changed - used to be widely distributed and leveraging our compute farm storage (hence scaling as the farm grew), the concentration of of storage over a few large data-servers caused bottlenecks. However, a caching layer could improve and reduce access hence load to those data servers. Multiple issues will arise and questions needs to be asked: - Can we leverage caching in the first place? [do we have dataset re-use over a 24 hours period for example]? - XCache infrastructure - is it flexible? Can we scale over many smaller nodes? [we do not want to displace the bottleneck from a few Xrootd data servers to ... a few cache] - If we deploy, what are the measure of success? [cache hit must minimally confirm our estimate of benefit, what is the scale of impact?]	Nothing special	J. Lauret	A. Jaikar L. Hajdu	Opened 2019/08
Title: Evaluation of a new "forum" based mailing list system Affected area: Communication, exchange Task description:		J. Lauret	RACF J.Lauret W. Betts	Opened
Title: GMT software integration Affected area: Calibrations Task description: Clean up existing code library for the GMT and bring it through code peer review.	C++	G. Van Buren	?	Untaken 2019/08
Title: Collider Performance impact on STAR data Affected area: Calibrations Task description: Use whatever tools we can (e.g. scalers, DCAs) to look for datasets impacted by collider performance similar to what was seen with the Booster Main Magnet for Run 18 AuAu27.	C++	G. Van Buren	Yue-Hang Leung	Taken 2019/09
Title: Integration of automated run-by-run Offline QA Affected area: QA Task description: Missing from Offline QA has been run-by-run (i.e. time and/or run dependence) QA plots. Significant work has been done to generate plots, but the final integration and interface to these plots needs to be completed.	open (e.g. develop web interface)	G. Van Buren	?	Untaken 2019/08
Title: Web Master Affected area: All web content Task description: None. Skill set includes PHP and a sense of organization.	PHP	J. Lauret	Daniel Nemes + David Stewart	2019/08 Taken 2019/10