Firedrake meeting 2022 11 23

Date and time 2022-11-23 16:00UTC

Action Items

1. Pick Chair and Minuter (KS to pick minuter)
2. ALL: (ongoing) triage the open issues and confirm if they are indeed still open (and perhaps provide labels)
3. DH: Organise Firedrake 2022 (Registration deadline approaching, events apart from talks?, see discussion below)
4. ALL: Rename split (.split -> .subfunctions) (ongoing - issue created)
5. JB: A Firedrake manual (ongoing)
6. JB: Python 3.11 (ongoing)
7. All: Go through TSFC PRs
8. RNH: check if issue #2516 is still a problem, if yes, see if #2509 Try installing pre-release of VTK from PyPI (supporting Python 3.10) fixes (done)
9. JB: Move PyOP2 and FInAT to firedrakeproject (ongoing)
10. ALL: do things with SV's branches

Agenda

Present: DH, JB, KS, JHC, RNH, DRS, PK, CW (minuter), NB

Apologies:

DH: Firedrake 2022

• DH: There are train strikes over this week. DH will look into chartering a coach from Imperial to Totnes via Reading, M4 (for Oxford) and possibly Exeter.
• DH: We might have time for extra events that aren't talks. Maybe general discussion, maybe clinic. DH could also do a longer-form presentation on, for example, how the adjoint works.

DRS: Checkpointing element bug

• DRS: Pickling of UFL elements broken somewhere.
• KS: Could possibly use __repr__.
• DH: Simplest case is variant, degree, cell. __repr__ might not be sufficient.
• Action point: KS to fix serialisation of elements.

DRS: pyadjoint + ROL

• Action point: DRS to talk to Angus Gibson about interface changes between ROL v1 and ROL v2. Also consider switching to v2.

JB: PyOP2 PYOP2_NO_FORK_AVAILABLE status

The code associated with PYOP2_NO_FORK_AVAILABLE is not tested and is broken (okay I broke it, but it's broken beyond this!! ie: loopy forks, maybe other dependencies too). I think I know why this exists, but is anyone using it, is it still worth maintaining and testing?

• DH: Realistically all clusters are Linux and no users have hit this. Dropping it is probably safe.
• Action point: JB go ahead and expunge.

Merge PRs

1. JHC: Additional MPI methods for Ensemble #2639 - reviewed
2. CW: Halo freezing: Firedrake and PyOP2 - merged
3. JB: GC Fix #2599 been round once before, DEFCON now has a fix, are we ready? - to resolve in separate meeting with DH
4. JB: Python 3.11 #2358, is this ready? Mac users? - not yet, homebrew ML bugs etc

Date of next meeting

1600 UTC 2022-12-07