AWSF TAC Meeting - March 13, 2019

Voting member attendance

Additional Attendees

John Mertic, Linux Foundation
Robert Vinluan, SideFX
Mark Elendt, SideFX
Greg Gewickey, Warner Brothers
Patrick Hodoul, Autodesk
Jeff Bradley, Dreamworks
Dan Bailey, ILM
Doug Walker, Autodesk
Todd Prives, Google
Thanh Ha, Linux Foundation

Agenda

Goals for TAC: Year 1
Technical Project updates
- OpenVDB
  - Decided on deprecation strategy: will support current and last 2 years of VFX Reference Platform, helps to transition away from older releases.
  - Release schedule: new major version Q3 or Q4, 2018 was quite late in the year, but typically around Oct-Nov, bump major version once a year. 7.0.0 in 2019, currently discussing what goes into that release (major releases can change ABI).
  - Draft GitHub pull request with CircleCI prototype to share with others to show what was needed, not complete, but builds correctly, supports different years of VFX Reference Platform. Waiting on decision of whether we move forward with CircleCI.
  - Have been using move to ASWF as opportunity to unify some processes, in particular the way they build Houdini SOPs. OpenVDB is shipped with Houdini, so had to deal with vendor-supplied and open source versions, trying to come up with a better way to deal with both sets of SOPs.
  - Work is continuing with transition to CMake, main focus of CI-related effort.
- OpenColorIO
  - Moving mailing lists to ASWF domain, shutting down old google group next Monday.
  - OCIO 1.1.1 bugfix release, optional compatibility with OIIO 2, next week or two. First release in a year, well due
  - Working on resolving embedded external dependencies, blocker on moving the repo over to ASWF.
  - Working on pairing developers to task, lots of interest in using OCIO v2, but that could be a year away.
  - Opportunity for member companies to dedicate some engineering time.
  - Will create GitHub Issues for tasks that need help.
  - One task is Metal render integration for macOS platform with upcoming OpenGL deprecation.
  - Recently made strides with ACES compatibility. Implements low level ACES algorithms as code instead of using LUTs.
  - Also ACES common LUT format is supported in Master branch, needed for official ACES support. Could do intermediate release with ACES compatibility if extra resources available? Maybe not, tied to changes to core renderer.
  - Daniel: lots of excitement when V2 features announced, also how does this line up with next VFX Reference Platform. Robert: meetings for 2020 starting soon, can bring up issues.
  - More generally need to coordinate ASWF releases.
  - Larry: would help to get schedule guidance from VFX Reference Platform to drive development of ASWF projects.
  - Robert: SIGGRAPH is “unofficial” deadline, but unclear what step this deadline is for. Process is somewhat fluid. Typically draft by SIGGRAPH time, but can entertain later releases with an amendment later in the year.
  - Larry: ASWF projects should try to line up for similar deadlines to make things easier / simpler, especially given cross project dependencies.
  - Daniel: opportunity to create a timeframe and process, and build a working prototype of next VFX Reference Platform.
OpenCue proposal
- https://lists.aswf.io/g/tac/topic/project_contribution/29992570
- Vote on adoption (incubation stage)
  - Larry: do we need further discussion before the vote happens? Don’t want a “provisional vote” that people would object to.
  - Bill: would like to see some discussion on it, time to do a deeper investigation on it. Same from Kimball.
  - Set goal of next TAC meeting for actual vote. Brian: happy to provide additional material, send out development roadmap.
  - Larry: would be great if Google could share feedback from other sources.
  - What are the implications on testing? Google has a Jenkins environment for builds from GitHub, but currently not a full, live testing environment.
- OpenCue currently uses the Apache CCLA and ICLA. Will this move to the LF / ASWF minimal CLA?
  - Todd/Brian: still Apache CLA, based on Google legal team recommendation. Could loop in the legal folks.
  - Larry: OpenColorIO had previously used Apache 2 CLA, switched to variant to minimal LF CLA, reason was that it didn’t make much sense to use Apache 2 CLA with BSD license. But Apache 2 CLA with Apache 2 License probably makes sense.
  - Daniel: project adoption guidelines advises that there’s no necessity to use Apache 2 CLA, and preference is for minimal CLA. Larry: may be best to stick to license infrastructure agreed to by Sony and Google to streamline the process.
- What skillset(s) are required to develop, deploy and test the components of OpenCue and the system as a whole?
  - Brian (Google): interested in hearing about what specific components of OpenCue may be of concern.
  - Daniel: Oracle/Postgres stored procedures may not be very familiar. Brian: have been thinking about roadmap to migrate functionality outside of database into code.
  - Daniel: there seems to be a lack of discussion?
  - Bill: most ASWF projects so far already have wide industry adoption, is it an issue that OpenCue hasn’t seen wide adoption yet since it is so new.
  - Brian: this could be the what the incubation phase is for?
  - Todd: Google took on this project as collaborative project with Sony, but also based on feedback from users of GCP for rendering. Studios want a hybrid cloud / onprem rendering infrastructure and rendering framework. Being part of ASWF should help to drive adoption. Daniel: it’s the chicken/egg problem of driving adoption.
- What CI coverage is currently in place for automated build and testing, and what are the requirements / costs of this setup?
- Is there security expertise currently associated with the project?
- (For the community) What’s the outlook for broad adoption of OpenCue?
  - Mid size facilities very interested, minimize per node costs, one less licensing mechanism to worry about.
  - Dreamworks doing an eval
  - AL: OpenCue shows its age (tooling and mechanisms), not necessarily a problem, suitable for scale and applications. Some expertise in databases and database stored procedures may not be so widespread in VFX community. If ASWF adopts, will there be resources to continue to develop and maintain the system.
- Brian: questions about the legal committee, what is required by the charter.
CI updates
- Working group
- Discussion on using CircleCI instead of Jenkins with LF releng team, better support for all our target platforms
- Challenge from Daniel: use OpenEXR fork as a prototype to implement CircleCI
- SonarCloud instead of SonarQube
- SideFX download client
Security Working Group
- Low response rate, is it a scheduling problem / timezone? Or a problem with resources / expertise / interest? (Doodle pool)
- Kimball offers to help
- Larry: should figure out who is willing to attend to learn, whereas who is willing to help / have expertise.
- Daniel: followed up with people who offered explicit help at face to face meeting in LA, need to follow up again.
Common linear algebra library?
- Very good discussion on TAC mailing list
Matching resources and developers
- Larry: Came from OpenColorIO, debate in community about releases, dilemma about only 2 developers doing V2 release work, don’t want to be distracted to do a 1.2 release for instance. They also feel that collection of new features go together, don’t want to piecemeal the release of those features. But that can result in a very long release schedule. Additional development resources could help in earlier staging of some of these features. Currently there are more member companies than ASWF projects, and OCIO could use help from developers who are not domain experts. More generally how do we match the resources from member companies with project needs.
- Kimball: should we use the “Summer of Code” model for matching needs to resources? Larry: there could be a Wiki where each project could post their top 5 requirements that could use additional / external resources.
- Daniel: could be used as an on-ramp for developer level contributions to ASWF projects.
- Dan: OpenVDB uses Jira, seems to work well for them. Was surprised at strong feelings against Jira. Doesn’t feel there’s a need to consolidate on single issue tracking system, but Jira works well for them. Could be a link to Jira issues from a Wiki page. GitHub has tags for “good first issues” to help new people approaching a project to pick tasks.
- Larry: some projects require a lot of specialized knowledge to make anything but trivial contributions. Dan: hard to identify “simple issues” and not just do it yourself. Larry: projects can also use help with CI-related work, doesn’t require domain knowledge. Mike: setting up static analysis and identifying flagged issues doesn’t require domain knowledge.
Update on candidate projects
- OpenEXR
- Others? (diskover?)
Next meeting
- 27 March 2019

Action Items (AIs)

John: Fix the timezone calendar problem(!). Maybe say “13:00 Pacific Timezone” in the meeting title.
Daniel: Contact VFX Platform (VES Technology Committee) to discuss timeframes / process for ASWF projects.
Daniel: Coordinate resource matching next steps with projects. ASWF website / marketing involvement?
All: Investigation and discussion on OpenCue proposal prior to vote at next TAC meeting.

Notes

Chat