Minutes from OpenVDB TSC meeting, Feburary 5th, 2025

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

Additional Attendees: None

Regrets: *Richard* J.

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Secretary
3) OpenVDB Course
4) Value Accessors
5) Half-Float Support, PR2002
6) PR1995
7) PR1919
8) Next meeting

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1) Confirm quorum

No quorum.

2) Secretary

Secretary is Jeff Lait.

3) OpenVDB Course

a) Rendering.  While used in rendering, nothing particularly novel or
   interesting beyond "Yes, we used it."
b) Permissions
   i) We want the content to be shippable.
   ii) Can we get the protected material excluded, or if not possible,
       switch to a shorter ten minute taster that doesn't have
       forbidden content?
c) Order
   i) Intro (Ken)
   ii) Applications
      1) Production Examples
      2) MPM (Alexandre)
      3) Capsules, United Therapeutics (Greg)
   iii) fVDB
   iv) Coding
      1) 16bit
      2) Iterators, Parallel Patterns
      3) Anistropic Surfacing
         a) Theory?
         b) Engineering of performance?

Will submit an inclusive application.

4) Value Accessors

Little re-use on GPU?  You can use a complete access instead often.
Add 8^3 hash table at root, so usually that gives free access, for no
linear search and direct access, excpet for rare collisions.

On CPU main bottle neck is getting an adjacent node, local -> global
-> hash is the cost, vs directly accessing leaf node.

Better native hardware support?  FMA?  v3 support?  Look into better
use of intrinsics?

Can use first static constructor to try to test instrumentation.

5) Half-Float Support, PR2002

Currently a DCO problem from commits that are already in the master
branch.  Can do a force push to unify?

Will try a new feature branch to see if that clears it up.

6) PR1995

Typo fixes.  Does change some actual code.   Would need to commit soon
so it doesn't diverge.  But we really want to make sure nothing
unintended slips through.

Ask for it with no code, and have two poeple running over every line.

7) PR1919

Finishes removing CPPUnit test, will be examined by Andre.

8) Next meeting

Agenda: TBD

Feburary 19th, 2025, usual time
