| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 11, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 22, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1558233 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Rajiv Ramnath
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $75,473.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $89,798.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2017 = $14,325.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
506 S WRIGHT ST URBANA IL US 61801-3620 (217)333-2187 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
Henry Administration Building 506 S Wright Street IL US 61801-3620 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS, Software Institutes |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN represent a huge step forward in the quest to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature, and their interactions. The discovery of the Higgs boson and the observation of very rare B meson decays, as predicted by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, demonstrate the strong scientific reach of LHC experiments. Despite these achievements, fundamental questions remain, including: Why does nature express the symmetries embodied in the SM, and not other symmetries? Why are there exactly three generations of basic building blocks (quarks and leptons)? Why are the masses of these building blocks so different from each other, both within a generation and between generations? What is the dark matter which pervades the universe? Does space-time have additional symmetries or extend beyond the three spatial dimensions we know? Planning for upgrades for a High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) in the 2020s is well underway. These upgrades will lead to a 100-fold increase in data volume. Exploiting the increased data volume and the large investments in upgraded detectors requires a commensurate investment in software to assure that the scientific goals are achieved.
The HL-LHC is expected to take data starting 10 years from now, and continue for many years. This conceptualization project will develop a Strategic Plan for an eventual S2I2 Institute which can address the software development and sustainability challenges of software for the HL-LHC era. This conceptualization project will support a series of workshops to prepare both the S2I2 Strategic Plan and, together with the international community, a Community White Paper providing an overall roadmap for both U.S. and international software efforts to realize the full science potential of the HL-LHC. This project advances the objectives of the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), an effort aimed at sustaining and enhancing the U.S. scientific, technological, and economic leadership position in High-Performance Computing (HPC) research, development, and deployment.
This project is supported by the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering and the Physics Division in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The quest to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature and their interactions is one of the oldest and most ambitious of human scientific endeavors. Facilities such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) represent a huge step forward in this quest. The next phase of this global scientific project will be the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) which will collect data starting circa 2026 and continue into the 2030’s to search for new physics beyond the standard model (SM). The NSF and the DOE are planning large investments in detector upgrades so the HL-LHC can operate in this high-rate environment. A commensurate investment in R&D for the software for acquiring, managing, processing and analyzing HL-LHC data is critical to maximize the return-on-investment in the upgraded accelerator and detectors and achieve the physics goals of the LHC experiments.
The primary goal of this project was to prepare a Strategic Plan for an NSF-funded Scientific Software Innovation Institute to help assure that software required to enable to the full physics reach of the upgraded LHC experiments for the HL-LHC era is available. The Institute should serve as an intellectual hub for the requisite software research, development, and deployment. As the Institute must exist inside the larger LHC software and computing community, a secondary goal with a broader scope was to have the LHC experiments (and others) generate a Community White Paper (CWP) outlining a roadmap for software R&D required to enable the full physics reach of the upgraded LHC experiments for Run 4.
The two major activities supported by this award were to execute workshops to achieve the project goals and to write the two promised deliverables -- the Strategic Plan for an NSF-funded Software Institute and a Community White Paper providing a broader roadmap for software R&D for the next 10 years. Over the award period, 18 workshops aimed to develop the key ideas, plans and priorities for the software R&D that are presented in these two documents were sponsored or co-sponsored by the project. Approximately 250 people participated in the workshops and contributed to one or both of the Strategic Plan and the CWP.
The community process and deliverables were disseminated though a variety of means. In addition to posting the Strategic Plan and the Community White Paper on the preprint archive, the S2I2 process and general overview of results were presented at the 2017 meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields held at Fermilab and the April 2018 meeting of the American Physical Society held in Columbus, OH and at the LHCC. In addition, more general presentations of the CWP were made by colleagues at several other workshops and conferences.
The workshops provided opportunities for professional development by increasing knowledge in the participants specific areas of expertise as well as the wider field of scientific software R&D. These workshops also provided a venue for participants to present their ideas and network with others in related fields. Several of the workshops and the CWP White Papers directly addressed the topics of training, software citation and credit for software as a driver of physics results which are key enablers of professional development.
The workshops themselves, and community efforts to prepare the CWP and the Strategic Plan, created something of a common vision on how software R&D to enable the physics program of the high luminosity LHC should be done. The roadmaps in those documents are already guiding plans in the US and at CERN for R&D projects. Several of the workshops were designed to engage researchers from other domain sciences (e.g. astrophysics and genomics) and computer science/data science/software engineering to identify areas of common interest.
Last Modified: 09/04/2018
Modified by: Mark S Neubauer
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