This week, US CMS held a “run-plan” workshop at Fermilab. The goal of the workshop was to really get a grip on what needs to be done when the LHC starts running and CMS starts taking data. Did we meet this goal? Do we actually have a plan now? Well, at the very least we have a better picture of what’s going on, and for someone like myself, who sits in Nebraska and spends most of his time thinking about computing, it is helpful to get the broader view. Here’s a sampler of some of the things going on:
- As you can read from some of the other posts on this site, there is a tremendous amount of work going on with the detector. We recently completed several days of data-taking with as much of the detector as we can, but with no beam (of course!) and no magnetic field. Even that is a huge effort; getting all these pieces of the detector working at once is quite complicated. And this is not just an operational exercise — the data that were recorded are potentially quite useful. Yes, we recorded a whole lot of nothing, but if you analyze that, you ought to observe…nothing. If instead you see something, then there is some detector effect going on that can contaminate beam-collision data, such that you would see something when you ought to see nothing. And when you are looking for new physics, and you don’t quite know what it’s going to look like, then nothing that looks like something is going to be a lot of trouble. One thing we hope to do is superimpose these “empty” events on top of simulations of “real” events, and see how badly our simulations degrade as a result.
- I spent most of my time in a working group focusing on computing issues. The most interesting presentation we had was from a student who has been busy using the computing system for several months. He of course has found ways to get his work done most efficiently…which were not necessarily the ways we imagined people using the system! It was great to what he and others find to be the most difficult things to do; we came up with some ideas for improvements that can be made. On balance, though, the system is working pretty well, even if we still have further to go.
- No one said that they had too many people working on a project. Everything still needs more effort. It’s encouraging in that any help that is offered will be welcomed.
I gave a couple of presentations at the workshop, one on what tasks have calls on the resources of Tier-2 centers, and one on some of the issues we need to think about in analyses involving leptons plus jets in the final state. These went well enough. More importantly, by coming to the workshop I had a chance to see some of my friends and colleagues face to face. Video conferencing is OK, but you can learn a lot by chatting in the cafeteria. There are some physics things that I really do want to get going on, especially now that the summer is here, and I spoke to a few far-flung collaborators who want to launch similar efforts. We all agreed to phone and email and so forth. One colleague emphasized to me that we must really seize the day now. I knew this already, but it was reinforced — the next few years will be a unique time in my entire scientific career, which still has a few decades to go, so I should make the most of it.
The title of this posting comes from Daniel Burnham, who was the principal planner for the layout of the city of Chicago, one of our great American cities; he believed that every resident should be within walking distance of a park, and decreed that the lakefront should always be free and accessible to the public. “Make no little plans,” he said, “They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.” It worked out well for Chicago; let’s make it the same for the LHC.
Tags: CMS, computing, conference, testing
