Events

China-JINR workshop on information technologies

On 15-19 September, a China-JINR workshop on the organization and development of data processing and analysis methods in future high-energy physics (HEP) experiments was held on the shore of Lake Baikal in the Listvyanka village.

The purpose of the seminar was to discuss the issues of cooperation between JINR and research organizations of China in the field of computing and software for the implementation of physics research programs within the experiments at operating and planned electron-positron and hadron colliders, namely, BEPCII (Beijing Electron-Positron Collider, IHEP CAS, Beijing), NICA (JINR), CEPC (Circular Electron Positron Collider, IHEP CAS, Beijing), STCF (Super Tau-Charm Factory, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China), as well as within the JUNO (Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, Jiangmen, China) experiment to study the properties of neutrinos. The issue of developing novel computing technologies in the field of elementary particle physics was also touched upon.

JINR Deputy Chief Scientific Secretary Alexey Zhemchugov opened the workshop with a talk on the current status of cooperation between China and JINR, highlighting the evolution of relations and outlining a possible vector for their development. MLIT Director Sergei Shmatov presented an overview of JINR achievements in the field of computing in HEP and the current status of the JINR computing infrastructure.

The first working day of the seminar was devoted to discussing the goals of future experiments planned in China and at JINR. The reports represented the overviews of the BESIII (Prof. Haibo Li, IHEP CAS), JUNO (Prof. Miao He, IHEP CAS) and SPD (Igor Denisenko, Head of Sector at DLNP) experiments, as well as the experiments at the Super Tau-Charm Factory (Prof. Haiping Peng, USTC). DLNP Senior Researcher Igor Boyko covered the prospects for JINR’s participation in the physics program of the CEPC experiment, and BLTP Senior Researcher Maria Savina delivered a talk on a possible trajectory for the development of research beyond the Standard Model.

At the end of the first day, several reports on different approaches to charged particle trajectory reconstruction (tracking) in HEP were presented. MLIT Deputy Director Nikolay Voytishin spoke about classical methods. Daniil Rusov from DLNP devoted his report to the application of machine learning methods to event reconstruction within the SPD experiment at NICA. IHEP Researcher XiaoCong Ai dwelled upon the use of the increasingly popular ACTS software package for track reconstruction in various experiments.

The second working day was entirely dedicated to computing and software for experiments. The current status and plans for the further development of software for experiments were presented by the following speakers: Shengsen Sun (BESIII), Ziyan Deng (JUNO), Xingtao Huang (STCF), Weidong Li (CEPC). The concepts of computing and current developments in this area were the subject of reports by MLIT Senior Researcher Danila Oleynik (SPD) and IHEP Senior Researcher Xiaomei Zhang (JUNO). MLIT Software Engineer Nikita Balashov spoke about the distributed environment for processing data from the JUNO experiment at JINR.

The afternoon session was devoted to middleware for integrating heterogeneous computing and data storage resources. MLIT specialists Igor Pelevanyuk and Artem Petrosyan shared their experience of deploying and using two most popular software tools for distributed storage and experimental data processing, DIRAC and PanDA, respectively.

During the reports and within the time allocated for discussions at the end of working days, there were heated debates aimed at solving current conceptual problems of the experiments under construction. During the discussions, MLIT Scientific Leader Vladimir Korenkov noted that one of the major problems hindering the development of cooperation with Chinese centers in the field of computing was the lack of a decent communication channel between JINR and Chinese institutes. The creation of a high-speed channel JINR – IHEP CAS was unanimously recognized as a top-priority task.

When discussing prospective plans for further cooperation, MLIT Director Sergei Shmatov expressed the idea of creating a unified Tier1 center at JINR for international HEP experiments located in China, in which JINR physicists will participate. At the same time, a data storage center for the NICA experiments should be created in China. It was decided to return to this issue at subsequent meetings.