AWSF TAC Meeting - September 25, 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
  • Michael B. Johnson, Apple
  • Dave Fellows, Microsoft
  • Ken Museth, OpenVDB Representative
  • Michael Dolan, OpenColorIO Representative
  • Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative
  • Joshua Minor, OpenTimelineIO Representative

Other Attendees

  • John Mertic, Linux Foundation
  • Mark Elendt, SideFX
  • Andrew Grimberg, Linux Foundation Release Engineering
  • Jeff Bradley, Dreamworks
  • Darren Sterling
  • Doug Walker, Autodesk
  • Robert Vinluan, SideFX

Apologies

  • Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative

Agenda

  • Goals for TAC: Year 2 [0:00 - 0:10]

    • ASWF changing goal targets to align on calendar years

    • Diversity and Inclusion targets

      • In both TAC and projects

      • Drawing up concrete targets as opposed to just an aspiration target

      • Should be assigned as an area of responsibility, anyone interested in leading that effort? Wave: happy to help, asking what is involved in something like that? Daniel: perhaps create a working group (similar to CI group). Wave: maybe identify educational institutions that we could engage with. We need to define the ultimate goal: diversity within the group involved with ASWF, or the people we engage with? Daniel: all goals are on the table, we’re starting from pretty far behind. Most of our membership (TAC, project leadership) is not diverse. Could see this as an opportunity for engagement within our industry and with education. Could use ASWF associate membership model to reach out to other groups. Wave: also on board of Cartoon Art Museum in SF, dealing with similar issues, can reach out to leadership who are already working on this. Michael Min: there was a women in animation panel at SIGGRAPH, can reach out to organizers. Also can reach out to Women in Software meetup in LA last week. Larry: even the studios and R&D teams in those studios is more diverse than ASWF / TAC, so should try to encourage internal people as well to get involved. Wave: will have something for next TAC meeting. Sean: we have individual TSCs, new working groups (security), so other opportunities for improving diversity.

    • Documentation, including mission statements

      • ASWF landscape: ecosystem of VFX open source projects. Previously was opensourcevfx.org The CNCF created a tool to represent these landscapes which we are reusing for ASWF. Used projects either in opensourcevfx.org site and had some kind of GitHub repo you could point to (system only works for projects in GitHub). Also looked at lists from Disney and Sony. Larry categorized the projects. Gives an at-a-glance overview of open source activity. Also lets us identify gaps. There are some projects missing, and probably also dead projects that should be removed. CNCF threshold is that the project has to be related to the industry, also had to have a commit in last 6 months. Opensourcevfx added requirement that the project should have been used in an actual production. Where should we comment on this? Backed by GitHub, so can use GitHub commenting

      • Template project (JF) Progress being made, feedback can be provided via GitHub. New items can be added as well.

      • Licenses for datasets and docs (John). Open Source projects typically use a Creative Commons license for documentation, images and other non code assets. For datasets the Linux Foundation as come up with the Community Data License with a permissive and a non permissive license. JF: how should we structure a dual license in a GitHub repo? John: using SPDX on each file to indicate which license they are under, can use SPDX as a comment in a MarkDown file. The code license is typically used to tag the overall GitHub repo, but will check with LF legal. Kimball: for datasets a separate repo is probably appropriate anyway.

      • Mission Statements: Need some good examples, guidance and structure for this.

    • Survey processes

  • New members [0:10-0:15]

    • Michael B. Johnson (Apple) aka “wave”

      • Joined Apple last year after 23+ years at Pixar

      • Pushed for ASWF membership

      • Current plan to help with CI

      • Trying to help with OpenTimelineIO team at Pixar

      • Looking at contributing back OpenEXR security fixes. Larry: you are encouraged to join the OpenEXR TSC meetings to discuss these issues.

    • Dave Fellows (Microsoft)

      • Engineering Manager at Azure, responsible for Azure Batch rendering service

      • Team came from Microsoft acquisition 5 years ago, had a Renderman on demand service

      • Looking forward to contribute to OpenCue, make it as easy as possible for studios to use rendering in the cloud.

      • Christian Smith on his team will be most engaged with OpenCue project.

      • Can answer questions about GPU usage on Azure.

  • Technical Project updates [0:15 - 0:35]

    • OpenTimelineIO

      • Joshua: having regular TSC meeting, good participation from Autodesk, Dreamworks and Netflix.

      • Autodesk is presenting proposal for universal coordinate system for spatial data

      • Reached out to Avid and Apple to get some technical info on how to interoperate with FCP and Media Composer.

      • Instead of just “fixing” reports, trying to figure out what has already been done in the community.

      • Autodesk has done code review for RV integration.

    • OpenCue

      • Added new TSC members: Microsoft and AWS, will help to make OpenCue a really good, cloud friendly scheduler.

    • OpenVDB

    • OpenColorIO

      • Michael: discussion for GPU testing, Sean has offered some resources (GPU nodes).

      • Michael: moving repo to ASWF GitHub organization next week

    • OpenEXR

      • From Cary via email:

      • Release v2.4.0 is out, the first under the ASWF banner.

      • CII best practices badge is now at 100%.

      • OpenEXR-related CVE’s on https://cve.mitre.org have been updated with the most recent information, noting issues and corresponding releases.

      • still working our way through SonarCloud “bugs” so that our quality gate is no longer “failing” - they’re really more nits and annoyances than true “bugs”.

      • we’re in the process of scheduled a meeting with a security expert, Dan Hutchinson of Foundry.

      • next steps for adoptions:

        • second pass at the license scan after a first round of cleanup

        • official board approval of license exceptions

        • mission statement

  • Security

    • Could stall quickly, like the last time we tried to spin up a working group

    • Concrete action points from OpenEXR

    • Attracting specific resources

    • Cary: useful first step would be to center around next OpenEXR meeting with Dan Hutchinson from Foundry. Are there opportunities for generalization?

    • Dave Fellows: is the scope security for all projects? Daniel: all projects, OpenEXR has some public CVEs so it has more exposure, and has been the first project looking at addressing security reports. OpenCue could have some pretty significant surface area, could see if security team in Azure could help.

    • Addition of Apple and Microsoft to ASWF should hopefully provide additional resources.

    • Kimball: still getting final confirmation for Dan Hutchison at OpenEXR TSC.

  • CI updates (Working Group) [0:35-0:45]

    • Python3

    • DTS deprecation

    • GPU builds and agents

    • Maya, Houdini, Nuke runtime tests

  • CMake best practice [0:45-0:50]

    • CMakeTools or other cross-project sharing

      • How to develop and propagate these best practices across our projects.

    • CPPCon 2019 talk by Craig Scott: Deep CMake for Library Authors (recording anywhere?)

    • Would it be worth hiring as a consultant?

    • Kimball: some patterns from OpenEXR should be documented in template project

    • Daniel: Should we separate out the module discovery part of every projects? Kimball: initially thought we should separate it, but less convinced now. “Here’s a Docker image that has a Reference Platform installation” in it may be a better approach? Larry: has been reading the Professional CMake book, using it as a guide to overhaul his own projects, still in “Cmake 2” land, need modernization. Less clear on how shareable things are.

  • Update on candidate projects

    • Joshua: developer for DJV is aware of ASWF, has been doing Windows fixes for OpenTimelineIO, so can arrange introduction if needed. Daniel asking for introduction.

  • Next meeting: 9 October 2019

Action Items (AIs)

  • Wave: Diversity and inclusion ideas for goals and processes (report next meeting)

  • Daniel: Mission statement examples and discussion on TAC list

  • Kimball: Advise timing for OpenEXR TSC which will cover security issues

Notes

Chat