MercuryMay 2021

Owned by Thomas Weinhart
Last updated: Apr 19, 2023 by Timo Plath
3 min read

Attention of

Introduction

Every year around May, the MercuryDPM developers have a 4-week period to focus on current issues with the software. This year the MercuryMonth will be May 3 – 28, 2021, as discussed.

As a team, our goal is to clean up the code base, document and add tutorials, complete features, merge back developed features to the trunk, and finally a new release of the software. Thus, we improve our code base. For the individual, the goal is to develop code that it is reusable, which will lead to users, and thus citations, of your work. 

Traditionally, we did the MercuryMonth outside the office, to get away from the regular work schedule. Previous outings were in Santorini, Tenerife and the Design lab. However, due to the COVID situation, we have to work from home. To stay connected we have a daily Teams meeting to discuss the progress, and a Slack group for discussions. 

Is it up to you and your supervisors to decide whether and to what extent you participate. I strong recommend it to all Mercury developers and users, as:

  • You will learn a great deal about MercuryDPM. 
  • Together, we help you develop the features you need for your project.
  • It is a great chance for newbies to have the attention of the more experienced developers, to get your ideas heard and your problems discussed.
  • Developing part of a large coding project is good experience, good for your cv, and a team effort you can be proud of.

Planning

I invite you all to share ideas here what to do this MercuryMonth. Please add to this list!

  • Add more documentation: This is a group effort, but especially important for the new users/developers: by documenting code you learn how the code works and make it easier for others to use. 
    • Document 
    • Tutorial 10 documented
    •  Review Tutorial 13 (Thomas Weinhart)
    • Update outdated documentation (cg)
    • Review \todo's
    • Open questions on Questions
    • Report bugs on website
    • Make videos to demonstrate work (Youtube, MercuryDPM website)
    • Send us papers using Mercury for the Website.
    • Review DNS records (Anthony Thornton)
    • Tutorial on STL reading, and splitting STL files (Sahar Pourandi)
    • There is a folder, Add. Documentation where you can put pdf's where features are described
  • New features: Finalise new features, then add to Trunk.
    • ..
  • Bug fixes: Work on the bugs reported in http://jira.mercurydpm.org. The most important ones are:
    • ..
  • Branches
    • Merging: Thursday Anthony will review which Branches are kept. (Anthony Thornton)
  • Move to git. (Anthony Thornton)
  • Invited speakers: Any suggestions for invited speakers.
  • Schedule a discussion 
    • On contact models (next week), why we make certain decisions (May 11)
      • Rolling velocity is currently calculated with diameter.
      • Yield criterium based on dissipation.
      • Tutorial 9 on inclined plane.
      • Papers cited.
      • Action points (see ContactLaws.pdf)

      • Mindlin rolling/torsion stiffness is fixed to sliding stiffness, as in Katterfeld, so no todo.

    • Julius Mbaziira on parallel programming (May 4)
      • how to run MercuryDPM on OpenMP/MPI
    • Juan Esteban Alvarez Presentation on Multiparticles (May 7)
    • Timo Plath Polydispersity
  • Social Events on Friday [1]
  • For each feature make a Tutorial and UnitTest? Or can they be combined?
  • ..
  • Servers
    • Some users cannot access confluence.
      • This is not a server issue as confluence is running, it may be a DNS issue
    • Also if you use firefox you get the old website. Therefore there is some sort of DNS issue.

Other issues: