Minutes from 147th OpenVDB TSC meeting, September 27th, 2022

Attendees: *Jeff* L., *Andre* P, *Dan* B., *Rich* J., *Ken* M.

Additional Attendees: Greg Hurst (United Therapeutics), Karl Marett, Bruce Cherniak (Intel), Edward Lam (SideFX), JT Nelson (Blender), Sebastian Gaida

Regrets: *Nick* A.

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Secretary
3) Root node offset recap
4) Outstanding PRs for version 10
5) Removing Boost
6) Half
7) CI and build
8) Next meeting

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1) Confirm quorum

Quorum is present.

2) Secretary

Secretary is Richard Jones.

3) Root node offset recap

It is now fast when it has specific alignment. For backwards compatability, we can look to use metadata to store Root Node Origin. Still need to decide whether allowing different alignment for different grids (requiring more handling in library - checks of compatibility etc.), or whether it is a compile time option. This could be either allow old style origin i.e. (0,0,0) and new (-2048, -2048, -2048) or to have any aligned grid Root Offset, storing this as member data.

The change to grid ABI should be in for for version 10, will add the offset member and we can update it later in a minor release (alongside all work dealing with alignment). To avoid changes to file format, it is suggested that this is realigned about (0,0,0) on load/save. Some initial testing shows no visible time (0ms) for test examples of say 2000 larger internal nodes. 

Should be up for review next week.

4) Outstanding PRs for version 10

The following would be good to merge in coming weeks for version 10.     
    - #1417 - vdb_tool
    - #1463 - nanovdb
    - #1351 - OpenVDBLink
    - #1382
    - #823
    - #731
    - #744
    - #1427


5) Removing Boost

VDB Tool has a uuid implementation, we can possibly use this in place of boost uuid. 

6) Half

Autodesk want half to update their version of VDB, require half. Greg has it on his to do list. 

7) CI and build

Dan will look at getting Houdini 19.5 CI working this week - some remaining boost issues, multiple versions coming up in the linker errors.Still working out what config is better for the improved VMs in Github for faster builds etc. balance between width per runner and number of runners we can have. 

8) Next meeting

Next meeting is on September 27th, 2022. 1pm-2pm EDT (GMT-4).