add meeting notes

Signed-off-by: Dan Bailey <[email protected]>

Author: danrbailey

tsc/meetings/2021-06-29.md

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+Minutes from 97th OpenVDB TSC meeting, June 29th, 2021, (EDT)
+
+Attendees: *Ken* M., *Jeff* L., *Dan* B., *Andre* P.
+
+Additional Attendees: JT Nelson (Blender), Bruce Cherniak (Intel),
+Sergio Rojas, Johannes Meng (Intel)
+
+
+Regrets: *Nick* A.
+
+Agenda:
+
+1) Confirm Quorum
+2) Secretary
+3) Google Forum
+4) NanoVDB
+5) 9.0
+6) String Grids
+7) Example Hip File
+8) Next meeting
+
+
+1) Confirm Quorum
+
+Quorum is present.
+
+2) Secretary
+
+Secretary is Dan Bailey.
+
+3) Google Forum
+
+JT has pointed out that the Google Forum is now longer embedded in the
+openvdb.org website. Having discussed the options, it was decided that the best
+route is to enable GitHub discussions with a general and a Q&A section as a
+replacement for the Google Forum. The Google Forum will not be made read-only,
+as there is still a community there which can post and answer questions.
+However, there should be a pinned thread highlighting that the TSC members would
+be primarily monitoring and responding to questions asked using GitHub
+Discussions. It may also be worth posting replies to new topics in the Google
+Forum to encourage people to re-post using GitHub Discussions. There is no known
+mechanism to extract content from Google Forum and migrate it to GitHub
+Discussions. The forum tab of the website should also be updated to provide
+clearer guidelines of how to ask questions and to include a link to the old
+Google Forum for searching old content.
+
+4) NanoVDB
+
+A couple of big changes have been introduced - a move to 64-bit addressing and
+native compression. PNanoVDB is almost ready and has a key benefit that it
+supports many more graphics APIs than CNano such as OpenCL.
+
+Autodesk requested relative error bounds instead of absolute error bounds. There
+are certain cases where this is useful, so this is being worked on.
+
+Ken to present an overview of NanoVDB at the TSC meeting on Tuesday 13 July and
+answer any questions about the library and API. The intention is to submit only
+the core library for review initially and not the viewer.
+
+Ken also looking at point quantization currently.
+
+5) 9.0
+
+The VFX Reference Platform has decided on a final deadline of 1st September as
+cut-off for inclusion in the VFX Reference Platform 2022. Intention is to
+release OpenVDB 9.0 around Siggraph time in order to meet that deadline. There
+is discussion ongoing in the TAC meetings about changes that have been made in
+how software gets included. Unlikely that NanoVDB would be reviewed and
+integrated in time, so may target 9.1.
+
+Dan to reach out to VFX Reference Platform and ask for clarification.
+
+6) String Grids
+
+Ken ok with deleting string grids, believe it was mainly included in the first
+place as an example of a non-trivial value type, not a realistic production
+type.
+
+7) Example Hip File
+
+Everyone agreed that putting the binary hip file in the openvdb_website Git repo
+is acceptable. It's not really best practice of how to use Git, but given that
+it changes infrequently and GitHub has restrictions on enabling Git LFS for
+hosted websites, there's no suitable alternative.
+
+8) Next meeting
+
+Next meeting is July 13th, 2021. 12pm-1pm EST (GMT-5).