AWSF TAC Meeting - September 11, 2019

Voting member attendance

  • Daniel Heckenberg - Chairperson, Animal Logic Pty Ltd
  • Gordon Bradley, Autodesk
  • Pilar Molina, Blue Sky Studios, Inc.
  • Michael O’Gorman, Cisco Systems Inc.
  • Henry Vera, Double Negative
  • Bill Ballew, DreamWorks Animation
  • Matt Kuhlenschmidt, Epic Games, Inc.
  • Brian Cipriano, Google & OpenCue Representative
  • Sean McDuffee, Intel Corporation
  • Larry Gritz, Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Jean-Francois Panisset, VES Technology Committee
  • Cory Omand, The Walt Disney Studios
  • Kimball Thurston, Weta Digital Limited
  • Eric Enderton, NVIDIA
  • Sean Looper, Amazon Web Services
  • Michael Min, Netflix
  • Gerald Tiu (Microsoft)
  • Michael Johnson (Apple)
  • Ken Museth, OpenVDB Representative
  • Michael Dolan, OpenColorIO Representative
  • Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative

Other Attendees

  • Jeff Bradley (DreamWorks Animation)
  • Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
  • Andrew Grimberg (Linux Foundation)
  • Doug Walker (Autodesk / OCIO)
  • Jordan Soles (RodeoFX)
  • Joshua Minor (Disney/Pixar)
  • Nvadapalli
  • Bernard Lefebvre

Apologies

  • Bill Ballew (DreamWorks Animation)

**Changed zoom meeting: **

https://zoom.us/j/7800299659

Agenda

  • Welcome to new members
    • Michael Johnson (Apple)
    • Gerald Tiu (Microsoft)
      • Director of M&E at Microsoft Azure, covers from scripts to post. Came from industry, worked at Pixar and ILM, excited to work on projects with industry partners.
  • Follow ups
    • CI documentation and sample project? (JF)
      • Nothing to share yet, but still committed to it. Will take shape of personal GitHub repo, then to be moved to ASWF when fleshed out.
      • Daniel suggest that the sample project (“teapot project”) could be used to demonstrate the use of existing ASWF projects (EXR, OCIO…). Show cross project dependencies, CI integration… Should this be a separate project to avoid mixing a project that demonstrates structure vs a project that demonstrates cross project integration.
      • Gordon: components designed to work within a larger framework, how compeling an example can you build by gluing these components together?
      • Sean: can we justify this project by connecting the dots between the ASWF projects and new projects that would fill the gaps?
      • Michael Min: how far do we want to scope this effort?
      • Cary: haven’t heard discussions about an objective to build a complete pipeline within the context of ASWF.
      • Daniel: there are other groups that have as a goal a fully open source production pipeline. Was suggesting a more modest goal to show a tutorial for developers.
      • Cary: had feedback about issues building OpenEXR as a sub-project of another CMake-based project. So more examples of CMake integration between projects would help.
      • Eric: a project that links all other projects is the hardest thing to compile
    • Member survey to guide TAC and CI efforts (Gordon)
      • Take our ad hoc surveys a step further, survey done at SIGGRAPH was not easy to determine “which voices are we hearing”.
      • Propose as a first step to do a deeper dive on the raw data that was gathered.
        • What are the questions we want to answer?
        • What would be the right survey questions to answer that?
      • We should have a post mortem of how well we’ve delivered on the expected value of the member companies in the first year.
      • Asking these questions seems to be larger than just the TAC, should this topic involve / be driven by the Governing Board? Do such discussions exist?
      • Daniel: first year strategy nominally runs until end of tenure of David Morin, in the process (with Daniel) of formulating goals for next year. Interested in hearing feedback from the TAC: next steps for CI, project needs… So it’s a two way interaction.
      • Gordon: can work with David, Emily, John and Daniel to help define this to help put this together.
      • Raw data: https://lists.aswf.io/g/tac/message/860
  • Annual TAC chair election
    • Daniel’s tenure ends in September, discussed with John a process to elect next TAC char, will send out a call for nominations via email list. If there are more than one candidate we will vote.
    • Anyone interested should reach out to Daniel to discuss what was involved. Estimate 4-5 hrs per week.
  • VOTE: OpenColorIO Graduation proposal
    • https://lists.aswf.io/g/tac/message/908
      • Michael Dolan sent out proposal (see link above)
      • Healthy committer base across vendors, VFX companies and individuals
      • Healthy flow of merges and commits
      • Completed CII badge
      • License scan completed (initial issues with embedded dependencies and their licenses)
      • ASWF has really helped with organization of governance and structure, documentation, contribution, security… Highly beneficial to the value of the project, and help new participation.
      • Value of OCIO to ASWF mission: project is well adopted in the industry, including outside the VFX industry (games). Speaks for itself. Looking forward to OCIO v2 next summer.
      • Daniel: project has been excellent at contributing to TAC process, CI system, setting of direction.
      • Andrew: project not yet migrated to ASWF GitHub, but will be done soon.
      • Quorum is met
      • Daniel proposes motion for graduation, Gordon seconds.
      • Many ayes, no abstains, no against. Motion passes unanimously, will be recommended to Governing Board for graduated status.
  • Goals for TAC: Year 2
    • CI
    • Dependency management
    • Security expertise and processes
    • Documentation standards and standardization
    • Vector / matrix library
  • Technical Project updates
    • OpenVDB
    • OpenColorIO
    • OpenEXR
      • Cary: beta release is out, feedback about CMake issues when building in context of larger CMake-based project.
      • Will be working on more disruptive changes.
      • Moving repo to ASWF GitHub waiting on CLA setup (business / legal)
      • Eager to move on splitting imath to separate project. Will touch on issues of whether it’s a separate, independent project, in a different repo with different license, CLA… Or is there a notion of a “dependant” project that shares infrastructure?
      • Could ASWF project inherit from a base project for some infrastructure (licensing / doc)?
    • OpenCue
    • OpenTimelineIO
  • CI updates
    • GPU build agents – hosting?
      • Not covered by free Azure build agents
      • Andrew: Azure Pipelines does not support a free pool of GPU builders. In talk with representatives at Azure Pipelines, where is Microsoft on roadmap with dynamic pool?
      • We (LF) have found a way to pretty easily deal with the cost model to manage Azure resources. Would be an option to spin up some managed pools.
      • Brings up issue of Jenkins environment: recommend to turn down that environment to save those costs. There’s a non trivial amount of work to spin up that infrastructure, takes about 2 days of work to spin up that environment.
      • Kimball: do we see ever needing Jenkins in the future? Andrew: OpenCue went to Azure Pipelines directly.
      • Kimball: move to decommission Jenkins, Larry seconds.
      • All Ayes, no opposed or abstain. Vote carries. Andrew to stand down the ASWF Jenkins infrastructure costs.
      • Sean: AWS would be happy to provide funding for GPU instances. Can use any resources for Azure Pipelines builds.
      • May need to use Mac Stadium for Mac GPU, but OCIO is happy with just Linux for now for their test suite. Doug: would be happy to test on Mac and Windows as well.
  • Update on candidate projects
    • Rez
  • Blog
    • Emily: launching ASWF blogs, call for participation went out on mailing list
  • Next meetings
    • CI working group: 18 September 2019
    • TAC: 25 September 2019

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

Chat