PyCBC Remote Meeting 16 17 September 2021

The broader PyCBC community is holding a virtual meeting on the 16th and 17th September 2021. This will consist of two afternoon sessions on those two days. The first day will focus on updates about infrastructure changes and developments, with chance for people to highlight short-author work using PyCBC through sparkler talks. The second day will be a chance for people to work together, and participate in a "hackathon" to remove python2 backwards-compatibility from much of the PyCBC code base (and in doing so learn a little about how everything all fits together).

All times are given in UTC. UK time is UTC+1, CEST is UTC+2, PST is UTC-7 (those are the two timezones that Alex and I work in, please add others here so I don't get it wrong!), IST is UTC+5:30

Zoom links

The quick Zoom links are:

• For the Thursday session: https://port-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82859606868?pwd=Y1EzLzQ1OStXVUd3cmtycXdGR3I5Zz09
• For the Friday session: https://port-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/84717015741?pwd=M2xqbEEwdUN3Q2duc0xNejJ5cE9VUT09

Full Zoom connection details are given at the bottom if joining by (for e.g.) phone.

Background Materials

General

Many of these are from the several workshops held by the GWOSC.

• Accessing open data / calibration : Argata Trovato
• LIGO Strain and data quality : Jess McIver
• Searches for Compact Binaries: Ian Harry

PyCBC specific

These follow materials in the PyCBC Tutorials repository.

• Basic of PyCBC: Alex Nitz
• Parameter Estimation with PyCBC: Collin Capano

DAY 1 12:00 - 13:30 UTC

• 12:00 (15 minutes) - Introductions
• 12:15 (5 minutes) - Retiring python2, v2.0.0 release plans, high-level roadmap (Alex Nitz)
• 12:20 (15 minutes) - Pegasus5 and PyCBC workflows in v2.X.X. (Ian Harry)
• 12:35 (10 minutes) - Using PyCBC to solve the problems of 3G observatories (Duncan Brown)
• 12:45 (10 minutes) - PE developments (Sumit Kumar)
• 12:55 (10 minutes) - Challenges of including LISA into PyCBC (Connor Weaving and Laura Nuttall)
• 13:05 (15 minutes) - PyGRB: A Targeted, Coherent CBC Search in PyCBC (Andrew Williamson)
• 13:20 (10 minutes) - How can we make PyCBC more accessible to new users? (Archana Pai)

DAY 1 14:00 - 15:40 UTC

Sparkler talks for short author works. These will be APS style talks (8 minutes + 2 for questions). Breakout rooms on the second day can be used for more in-depth discussion on any questions raised during these talks.

• 14:00 (10 minutes) - Hierarchical all-sky search for compact binary mergers (Kanchan Soni)
• 14:10 (10 minutes) - Machine-Learning powered statistic in all sky searches (Shreejit Jadav)
• 14:20 (10 minutes) - Deep learning coincident gravitational-wave search algorithms (Marlin Schäfer)
• 14:30 (10 minutes) - A hierarchical approach to matched filtering using a reduced basis (Rahul Dhurkunde)
• 14:40 (10 minutes) - Targeting IMBH signals with PyCBC (Koustav Chandra)
• 14:50 (10 minutes) - Using Omicron to improve PyCBC search’s sensitivity (Marion Pillas)
• 15:00 (10 minutes) - TEOBResumS: a faithful and efficient waveform model for GWs from generic compact binaries (Rosella Gamba)
• 15:10 (10 minutes) - Including the effects of non-stationary in PE with PyCBC (Oliver Edy)
• 15:20 (10 minutes) - Detection and sky localization of CBCs using Particle Swarm Optimization (Souradeep Pal)
• 15:30 (10 minutes) - Source classification for PyCBC (Verónica Villa Ortega)

DAY 2 12:00 - 15:30 UTC

Hackathon and group discussions. We'll use Zoom's Breakout Room functionality for this (make sure you have an up-to-date Zoom client!), which allows you to freely join and move about breakout rooms.

Possible Discussion Topics

• How to encourage involvement and delegate work to help make PyCBC more accessible
  • Can we come up with some concrete steps?
  • What are the most critical gaps?
• LISA / Space-based GW analysis
• Preparing for 3G detectors ET / CE

Possible Hackathon Topics

• Removing python2 support from PyCBC. This is a big topic, so I'll try and provide some helpful links for how this should work.
  • https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/index.html -> It's good to know what is new in python3 vs python2. PyCBC offers support for python3.7+, so we should be using all the cool features in python3.7, but we cannot use new stuff in python3.8 and python3.9 (unless there is an alternative code path for what to do in python3.7).
  • https://adamj.eu/tech/2019/03/13/dropping-python-2-support/ -> Gives some of the big-picture things that should be being removed from code.
  • https://gist.github.com/jrief/0e6b97be132452a511eae81d54ca01ae -> Gives a longer, but no so clear if you don't know what it means, list of things to remove from module code.
  • https://python3statement.org/practicalities/ -> Gives some considerations of the best practice when using python3, and how you can get bitten. (Some things in here are still common practice, e.g. python setup.py install is still widely used, but is discouraged!)
  • https://sebastianraschka.com/Articles/2014_python_2_3_key_diff.html -> More discussion of differences between python2 and python3 and things to watch out for when porting code.
  • A note from Ian: The difference between str in python2 (which is bytes in python3) and str in python3 (which is unicode in python2) caused a number of issues, in particular in HDF. If there are cases where .encode() or .decode() are being used it can probably now be removed. HDF's own string types and dtypes (https://docs.h5py.org/en/stable/strings.html) should be used where possible.
• Documentation improvements
  • All of PyCBC's documentation lives in the main PyCBC repository and is automatically generated into webpages. This all lives here: https://github.com/gwastro/pycbc/tree/master/docs. Function/class documentation is taking from the docstring associated with the function/class.
  • This is build using sphinx and numpydoc formatting. In short "what numpy uses".
  • For an overview of this see https://numpydoc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/format.html and the example https://numpydoc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/example.html
  • As with many things though, using the existing code as an example is normally a good starting point!
• PE optimizations
• Making workflow modifications
• PyCBC Live O4 development ideas
• Integration of PyCBC with Astropy
• use of tensorflow / pytorch to help accelerate some critical codepaths?

Full Zoom details

Ian Harry is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: PyCBC Remote meeting
Time: Sep 16, 2021 01:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://port-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82859606868?pwd=Y1EzLzQ1OStXVUd3cmtycXdGR3I5Zz09

Meeting ID: 828 5960 6868
Passcode: Zql4Z9Ky
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Meeting ID: 828 5960 6868
Find your local number: https://port-ac-uk.zoom.us/u/kcgb80liJ

Ian Harry is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: PyCBC Remote Meeting
Time: Sep 17, 2021 01:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://port-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/84717015741?pwd=M2xqbEEwdUN3Q2duc0xNejJ5cE9VUT09

Meeting ID: 847 1701 5741
Passcode: 0y5z50rX
One tap mobile
+443300885830,,84717015741# United Kingdom
+441314601196,,84717015741# United Kingdom

Dial by your location
+44 330 088 5830 United Kingdom
+44 131 460 1196 United Kingdom
+44 203 481 5237 United Kingdom
+44 203 481 5240 United Kingdom
+44 203 901 7895 United Kingdom
+44 208 080 6591 United Kingdom
+44 208 080 6592 United Kingdom
Meeting ID: 847 1701 5741
Find your local number: https://port-ac-uk.zoom.us/u/kcAut945FK