Minutes from 80th OpenVDB TSC meeting, Feb 16th, 2021, (EDT)

Attendees: *Nick* A., *Jeff* L., *Ken* M., *Dan* B, *Andre* P.

Additional Attendees: Johannes Meng (Intel), JT Nelson (Blender),
Bruce Chernaik (Intel), Laura Lediaev (ImageWorks), Richard Jones (DNeg)

Regrets: none

Agenda:

1) Confirm Quorum
2) Secretary
3) TBB PR
4) Siggraph Course
5) Inline Half
6) TAC Survey Results
7) GSOC
8) Blender Update
9) Morphology PR
10) CI Throughput
11) Jeff Budsberg Extrapolate SOP Feedback
12) Next meeting


1) Confirm Quorum

Quorum is present.

2) Secretary

Secretary is Dan Bailey.

3) TBB PR

External contributor PR 969 for migrating away from TBB mutex and TBB atomics.
Ken to try and build this against TBB 2021. Any changes can be pushed directly
to this PR. Main area of caution is around memory ordering between tbb::atomic
and std::atomic. Since C++11, implementation of std::atomic now supports
different memory orders so possible to match behavior with tbb::atomic.
Deprecation of TBB constructs is discussed here:

https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/tbb-revamp.html

4) Siggraph Course

All intending to present need to send Ken a brief bio and description of topics
to talk about.

5) Inline Half

Dan submitted a PR to test USE_IMATH_HALF in CI, now approved and merged. As
soon as CI checks pass, good to merge this PR.

6) TAC Survey Results

Not a huge sample size (40-50 respondees). Main feedback is that people are
happy with the library, but would like it to be easier to build - we should
continue to remove, embed and/or make dependencies optional.

A few people indicated the flexible tree configuration is useful, but not enough
detail to draw out from that whether that means value type configuration of tree
configuration.

7) GSOC

Some changes to the GSOC program this year, notably reducing the student
contribution time. There is also an ASWF outreach program that will be coming
that we can target. General feeling is that the ASWF outreach might be more
suitable this year and we should skip the GSOC application this time around.
PyBind11 migration and general python library improvements could be a good
project.

8) Blender Update

There is a Blender update coming from JT.

9) Morphology PR

Some late feedback from Dan (sorry Nick). Decision on whether to simplify API is
probably the most important before we merge. There are some vendors very
interested in this change. Aim to merge next week.

10) CI Throughput

CI needs to be faster, should consider all routes to achieve this.

11) Jeff Budsberg Extrapolate SOP Feedback

Jeff provided some feedback on the Extrapolate SOP. Some thoughts on renaming UI
elements. A question about whether unsigned level sets are supported - not
currently but can be added later, should be simple to treat as density
extrapolation. A question about resampling - perhaps sampling the mask is more
appropriate, but provided functionality doesn't exist at all in this first
version, ok to proceed with merging and address this point later.

12) Next meeting

Next meeting is Feb 23rd, 2021. 12pm-1pm EST (GMT-5).