On Monday November 25th, the REALTIME ASG and the Pufendorf IAS (located here) will welcome two guests from physics that work on the topic of real-time decision making in big science environments: the European XFEL in Hamburg and the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Geneva.
The schedule of the event is as follows:
10:15-12:00 Seminars from EuXFEL and CERN guests, and general discussion
12:00-13:30 Lunch break
13:30-16:00 More specific/technical discussion (you can leave a message in the contact form if you have preferences to discuss a specific topic relevant to your research), followed by fika
The first guest is Steve Aplin from EuXFEL, and the abstract for his contribution is below.
Photon Science has traditionally relied upon data analysis beginning once data taking has ceased. This approach is currently proving a significant hinderance to progress within the field.
The European XFEL (EuXFEL) began initial user operation in 2017 with two instruments, and has recently reached full operation, with all six instruments being brought online in 2019. The experience of the last two years has shown the importance of moving to a paradigm where data analysis takes place continuously alongside the ongoing experiment, both in real-time and near real-time. With data volumes reaching 1PB per experiment over a 5 day period, there are technical and financial constraints driven by the requirement to store all raw data being taken. Data reduction, while largely untried within the community, represents a real opportunity to push experimental methods forwards by allowing currently unsustainable data rates, albeit with a significant increase in complexity.
I will present the need for real-time and near real-time data analysis at EuXFEL and the challenges associated with providing them.
Following this contribution, our second guest, Sioni Paris Summers, will describe aspects of real-time decision-making at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the largest particle collider ever built, colliding protons every 25 nanoseconds. It is impossible to record this enormous amount of data for further analysis. For this reason, the trigger systems of experiments located at the LHC, realized using a combination of electronic boards and software solutions, are used to take decisions on whether a collision event is interesting and should be kept or whether it should be discarded, all in the span of micro-seconds. With his collaborators, Dr. Summers works on tools that make programming the electronic boards more accessible to physicists and engineers, with a particular focus to fast inference methods such as those provided by machine learning. More information can be found in this article on the CERN courier.
The two contributions will be followed by a general discussion over the lunch break (12-13:30), and subsequently by a more detailed discussion in the afternoon (13:30-16). The outcome of this day at the ASG will inform the discussions upcoming Big Science Sweden conference held in Lund on the 26th and 27th of November 2019. The discussion ongoing in these days connect to the work of members of the ASG (see e.g. this press release) and set the ground for further interdisciplinary collaborations.