Minutes, Graphics Week Organizational Meeting Present: Mike Shupe, Harry Melanson, Jeff Kallembach, Norman Graf, Rob Snihur, Nobu Oshima, Wyatt Merritt, Silvia Repond, Saul Youssef, Harrison Prosper (via video). May 11, 1998. S.Y. and M.S. proposed a general plan for our group. Our main charge is to produce a working event display for physics analysis in Run II. This must be ready in 24 months. However, we proposed to concentrate our immediate efforts on supplying those in other groups who have immediate needs for event displays. This has many benefits for us as well as helping in a critical time for algorithm development. Roughly speaking, we proposed 12 months of supplying immediate needs and building infrastructure (a big component of which is connecting with Harry Melanson's geometry and calibration system). This would be followed by 6 months of integration to produce a complete integrated event display for physics analysis. One of the main goals for this week is to make contact with each group that has these needs and to find someone in our group who can help. M.S. and S.Y. have been doing this the previous week and so far we have... System Contacts Graphics Person ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Silicon Meena and Ann Heinson ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CFT Norman Graf Norman Graf ----------------------------------------------------------------------- FPS John Kotcher ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CPS ? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Muon Ken Johns ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Cal John Womersley ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Geom/Calib Harry Melanson ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Online&Trigger ? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Global Tracking Norman Graf ----------------------------------------------------------------------- We would like to fill out this table very soon. Jeff Kallembach told us about what is happening in CD in this area. A major effort in visualization and/or event displays is being proposed in CD. Amber Boehnlein would probably be involved in this. Jeff also expects this to make heavy use of Inventor since they have good experience with it so far and since Inventor will be part of GEANT4. S.Y. asked if CD could directly provide help with Run II displays. Jeff said that it was too early to say. Jeff also reported that Inventor licenses have arrived for several sgi machines and a couple of PC's. They are planned for d0chb, a CDF machine and fssgi0. S.Y. asked about a license for d0sgifsu1 since this is the top graphics machine at D0. On a PC, these licenses are approximately $750 for a developer license and $100 for a user license. Wyatt emphasised our role as defining a framework for people outside of our group to make their own displays [something analogous to Wyatt's "getting started with Run II computing page sounds like the thing to do]. Norman Graf described what he has been doing with Inventor within D0 where he has successfully extracted geometric information from Harry Melanson's data base and CFT chunk information and made displays with Inventor. In doing this he makes use of CD's HepVis library to supply GEANT volumes and a somewhat HEP oriented GUI instead of the generic Inventor GUI. During this discussion it became clear that an Inventor solution is our only potential solution where we will have access to the methods of the objects we are displaying, e.g. for "pick and refit" kinds of operations. This might be very useful, especially for debugging. Norman has been quite happy with his experience with Inventor. Nobu Oshima has been investigating the WIRED project from CERN. This is a Java based event display application which supplies a framework for other experiments. They are using CORBA and other systems to handle C++/Java interfaces. S.Y. asked about Java3D. It appears that WIRED are not using this API but we haven't figured out why yet. As a test, Nobu has arranged for a patch of the GEANT Gdraw routine to produce a WIRED readable file thus display selected parts of the D0 geometry. S.Y. suggested that Java might be a nice solution for Mike Shupe's 2D Pixie style displays since Inventor does not seem to have the concept of 2D in it. M.S. and S.Y. suggested that we should have the goal of making event displays easily accessible on many machines including PCs and not just at the level of one machine per institution capable of producing displays. Harrison Prosper volunteered to come up to Fermilab in June and help Nobu with Inventor displays of the Silicon. We arranged for a separate demo and discussion with Norman Graf showing his CFT code and with Jeff Kallembach who will demo Joe Boudreau's CDF tracking debugging display for later this week.