User Support News 21 March 2007

The items from which I expect feed-back are marked in red and the items which I propose as action items in the JOC meeting are marked in bold red .

Tutorials

Physics/Trigger -> Offline/Computing week tutorial

It was decided that the CMSSW tutorial is held during the Offline/Computing weeks and not during Physics/Trigger weeks. I find this a pity as tutorial clients are mainly Physics week participants and not offline/computing people.

Scheduled tutorials

A list of scheduled tutorials can be seen in the tutorial page, basically each CMS or Offline/Computing (was Physics/Trigger) week. A visualization tutorial by Yana Osborne is rescheduled for June. Any suggestions for April?

Local tutorials

A tutorial session was held in Helsinki with 16 participants, with an introductory lecture and hands-on exercises chosen based on participants interest. Excellent work done by Benedikt Hegner and Michele Pioppi.

Documentation

Reminder:

• WorkBook: to get started and up to first analysis
• Reference Manual: brief description of content and purpose of each package
• CMS Offline Guide:
  • description of algorithms
  • usage and "how-to" documents which are too detailed for the WorkBook
  • gathers information currently spread in numerous wiki pages to a single structure.

WorkBook

Moving to CMSSW_1_2_0 in the WorkBook, see https://hypernews.cern.ch/HyperNews/CMS/get/workbook/128.html. This means that all the tutorials in the WorkBook should use 1_2_0 or a more recent version.

Jose Sanches will start working part of his time as a trobleshooter for application (CMSSW) problems, and to get started he will go through the tutorials and see which of these break for the change of release. The WorkBook contributors are asked to provide all help he needs to get started.

Printed WorkBook copies have all gone.

CMS Offline Guide

Work in progress:

I'm still waiting feedback from

• Tommaso and Shahram on https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMS/SWGuideReco
• Luca and Oliver on how to proceed with https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMS/CalAliDB
• DPG coordinators on HCAL and local muon pages

Reference Manual

The release for which all the subsystem and packages are required to have a documentation page in the reference manual is 1_4_0. The announcement sent to the software development HN forum: https://hypernews.cern.ch/HyperNews/CMS/get/swDevelopment/858.html and a reminder about the cvs links in https://hypernews.cern.ch/HyperNews/CMS/get/swDevelopment/868/1.html

I have sent a reminder to each Offline, DPG, and POG group's hypernews forum prior to their meetings.

We need a person who can take responsibility for managing the Reference Manual, requesting updates, monitoring quality. I have included an estimated manpower needed for this (0.3 CatB) in the computing project manpower plan, but it is more natural that this person comes from the Offline project.

Getting help

Problem reporting channel for data/computing issues

We will have a rotating task for CatA computing people to monitor and follow the different channels used in reporting computing problems (HN, ggus, savannah). I have discussed this with Christoph and Peter Kreuzer and defined the list persons who can participate to this effort. There's a clear consensus that the user questions on data access/computing should be directed to savannah rather that the HN discussion lists to free the discussion lists for the technical discussions and to assure that the questions get answered. We will organize this in a meeting on Monday March 26, and this will be announced to the wide public when we know that the persons participating can effectively start solving/directing problems. To start with, we monitor the problems and get the knowlegde built.

Problem reporting for application (CMSSW) issues

Jose Sanches will start as a trouble shooter for the application problems (part of his time). His task will first be to reproduce the problem reported to savannah user questions and assure that the user has provided all the necessary information and thus reduce the workload of the developers. Later on, when he gains experience, he will be able to solve the problems. This is a demanding task and the group conveners are asked to give him all support he needs in the learning process.

-- CMSUserSupport - 21 Mar 2007