AWSF TAC Meeting - April 8, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic (Linux Foundation)
Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
JT Nelson (Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group)
Jeff Bradley (DreamWorks)
Mitch Prater (Laika)
Tiago Chaves (Unicamp)
Mike Zink (Warner Brothers)

Apologies

Michael B. Johnson, Apple
Sean Looper, Amazon Web Services
Joshua Minor, OTIO / Pixar
Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative

Agenda

New member introduction: Christopher Kulla (OSL TSC Chair) [0:00-0:10]
- OSL adoption process, first TSC meeting happened last week, chair was elected, Chris Kula from Imageworks.
- Chris: Rendering Lead at Imageworks, will be chair of OSL project. Had first meeting, Larry in process of transitioning things over, establishing founding documents. Leveraged experience from OCIO, should be fairly straightforward process. Should be able to get this done in next meeting or two.
- Project will have an architect position: Larry Gritz taking that position.
Google Summer of Code (Larry) [0:10-0:20]
- Last time we met the applicants had just come in and deadline had just closed.
- Lots of activity in the last week to narrow down the applicants.
- Larry: applications have been triaged, interesting process. 75 applications, ⅔ of which were “not serious” (mostly empty or one line, or elaborate proposals not pertinent to our organization). But 22 were valid proposals, next step is for projects to look at ones that are relevant to them, rank and evaluate them.
- Each project to evaluate a “front runner” they want to go for. Official Google guidelines say that first time organizations will get only one to two, but we are an unusual organization that covers a number of projects with people who have experience with the process, so perhaps we might get more?
- Meeting next week to come up with a unified list, and submit list to Google on April 21st.
- Brian: got 4 or 5 strong proposals. Larry: hopefully people who don’t get selected might still want to “stick around”.
- Michael: 1 or 2 good candidates for OCIO
- Larry: 1 very strong front runner for OpenEXR, with a couple of others as well.
- Daniel: should we take up the topic of how many students with Google? Larry: we technically tell them a minimum and maximum number. Daniel: the model of a foundation requiring multiple students should not be an exception.
- Daniel: how do we engage all of the good students who submitted, we should very actively target those students. Projects accepted under the Google program get additional structure and resources, but what about projects that are valid but don’t make it in GSoC?
- Larry: we haven’t done the hard part of mentoring students yet, we’ll soon know how much time / effort it takes to mentor a student. If there is extra money available to sponsor students, could be done at other times throughout the year.
- Daniel: as a group we have the resources and authority to pursue those approaches.
- Larry: if we only get GSoC for 2 students but there are 4 outstanding proposals…
- Gordon: getting students productive could take a significant amount of time.
- Chris Kulla: degree of involvement with any particular student can take very different amounts of time based on who the person is.
- John: there are parts of Linux Foundation Community Bridge that could be used if we decided to sponsor students directly. Daniel: Community Bridge can offer the additional step of linking a company that needs a specific feature to a specific activity.
- Daniel: to what extent do the students who applied overlap with our Diversity & Inclusion goals? Larry: pretty good for diversity along the international and age axis, but probably not along other axis.
- Gordon: if there was at least one opportunity to help meet some D&I goals, that could be useful.
- Bill: has Google provided info on diversity from last year? Larry: probably but hasn’t seen it yet. Google typically publishes blog entries on the topic.
- Daniel: more feedback at next TAC meeting.
CI updates (Working Group) [0:20-0:30]
- Migrate to GitHub Actions by July?
  - Focus on GitHub Actions for all projects instead of trying to support both Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions. Will try to migrate all projects to GitHub Actions. Helps with making subtle differences between the two systems, such as a single credential / secret sharing system.
- GPU setup: OCIO on GitHub Actions and AWS
  - Choose project and cloud provider: OCIO and AWS
- Michael: started migrating project to GitHub Actions this week, syntax is fairly similar to Azure Pipelines, shouldn’t be a huge undertaking. Some cool features in GitHub Actions, non-CI actions such as marking stale pull requests, should be a positive move in general.
- OpenVDB has already advanced along this route.
- Brian: OpenCue has done some basic research, but no major progress yet. Proposed timeframe should work.
- John: commonality of infrastructure is a goal, so it’s not just the current 6 projects.
- JF: aswf-sample-project opened ticket to move to ASWF GitHub organization.
- JF: would be really helpful if the ASWF web site was backed by GitHub. John: Daniel could bubble this up to the Board. Will contact Emily for high level updates to the web site.
- Michael: have ticket for OCIO with releng once moved to GitHub Actions
- Chris: OSL will be eager to test the GPU support as well. OSL is already on GitHub Actions. Michael: if OSL is ready before OCIO, they can just go ahead. Larry: if someone wants to use OSL as the test bed for GitHub Actions, go ahead since they already have that in place. Chris: happy to volunteer to get this going.
- Chris: is there any kind of alignment in term of matrix of configurations we want to try (VFX platform years). Daniel: very good question, something that has been discussed in the past but no uniform guidance so far. Most projects on Linux are using the Docker images from Aloys project, there’s some interesting complexity with the current year being still in flux, USD, Python 2 or 3… Larry: the Reference Platform doesn’t make explicit statements as to how many years back of the platform should be supported. Not always clear how far back you have to support. Michael Min: agreed. Daniel: OpenVDB has a very clear position on these questions. Kimball: answer will be different if you are part of the VFX Platform or not. Also non-Linux platforms have the least amount of consistency right now.
- Michael Dolan: once you get beyond 10 concurrent jobs your CI time goes up a lot, OCIO mostly testing against VFX Reference Platform 2019, even testing 2 years you can end up with 15 different jobs for every PR.
- Larry: is there logic in the GitHub Actions to select which combinations of builds we want to try depending on the type of build? Michael: yes, OCIO does this right now: there’s a nightly build if there’s been a commit, also runs SonarCloud, but does not run on PRs. Possible to test which type of build is running and skip some combinations accordingly.
Zoom guidelines (John) [0:30-0:35]
- GitHub PR
- Based on CNCF guidelines.
- Zoom is the current choice for a lot of online collaboration, and many security implications.
- Some issues linked with the Zoom platform itself, others linked to setup (“Zoom Bombing”).
- Everyone will need a Zoom account to join a meeting, additional controls on screen sharing, moderator control. Can also password protect private meetings.
- Also general best practices: how to deal with someone who is being inappropriate in a meeting, along with good ideas for a meeting.
- Daniel: what about company systems that use “rooms” and “bridges”, will this cause an issue? John: should not interfere, will need to enter the password if you join by phone. What about if you are using a SIP client? May need help to test some of the combinations.
- Daniel: can always use the TAC mailing list to note that there’s been a change of configuration / help anyone who has issues connecting. John: we can add some explicit language to the document as to who to contact in case of problems.
Code of Conduct for ASWF / Projects (John) [0:35-0:40]
- GitHub PR
- A lot of our projects have aligned with the Linux Foundation LLC Code of Conduct.
- Tried to clarify which project is lining up on what.
- Larry noticed that we have 4 projects that have some specific changes, is that OK?
- Larry: copied the OpenEXR document when creating OSL, but John noticed that there are a few changes that paraphrase the Linux Foundation CoC.
- Larry: less aligning existing projects, more that there should be a sensible, single default for new projects.
- Larry: many open source communities have long discussions on the topic, having a single default one can help with that, but don’t need to change any project that have already established one retroactively.
- John: we can also just accept the CoC from a new project that has already created one that generally lines up.
Working Group updates [0:40-0:50]
- Template PR GitHub
- Python 3
  - Productive meeting of the LA Pipeline Meetup on the topic of Python 3, should TAC partner with that group for instance?
  - Good international participation, recording is available:
- USD
  - USD WG suspended for now due to current situation
  - Daniel: got some questions as to whether the TAC / Foundation could help with to support the WG, this WG needs high level of involvement by Pixar.
  - Daniel: are there specific areas where we could make some contributions to the goals of this WG?
  - Larry: just how suspended is this? Or do we expect this to be a long term thing? USD-related needs at SPI are not shrinking?
  - Cory: not a long term suspension by any means, a lot of workload from supporting current productions, so don’t want to add load to the USD team, but should be able to re-engage soon. Even things that USD team has asked for help still require involvement from USD team.
  - Daniel: current timeframe for suspension is through end of April, but to be revisited.
  - Cory: asking Larry, which are the USD-related activities at SPI that might be helped by the WG? Larry: interested in “how should we organize shots / layers / sequences”, “how to deal with areas where there are no published schemas”. Looking forward to a forum to help discuss and determine best practices, and hopefully get guidance from others who have already made progress on these topics. Cory: some of this might be done without the involvement of the USD teams, but of course Pixar USD team has a lot of experience using USD on movies. Larry: SPI happy to throw some resources, have already contributed several PRs to the project.
- Diversity & Inclusion
  - Emily and Wave have been working on this topic.
  - Specific proposal is to put together a WG.
  - Emily: create a more formal WG, not everyone on the TAC may be the best person to drive these efforts. TAC members should look inside their own organizations to see if there is someone who would be interested / qualified to join this effort. Bill: should people interested reach out directly to Emily? Emily: yes, also should there be some kind of formal “vote” to establish a WG? Daniel: yes, as per the above discussion on the more formalized WG process. Emily: want to put together a short list of people interested in taking part in this effort.
Update on candidate projects
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AWSF TAC Meeting - April 8, 2020

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

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