Brilliant PhD defense as one of the MLIT results of the year On 20 December, Sergey Belov successfully defended his thesis for the degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences at the Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies. The topic of the thesis was Big Data methods and technologies for solving high-energy physics tasks in a distributed computing environment. MLIT Scientific Leader, Doctor of Technical Sciences Vladimir Korenkov was the scientific supervisor of the work. Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Lev Dudko, Head of the Laboratory of Electroweak and New Interactions of the Department of Experimental High Energy Physics of SINP MSU, became the scientific consultant of the thesis. Alexander Afanasyev, Head of the Distributed Computing Center of IITP RAS, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and Andrey Tsaregorodtsev, a highly qualified research engineer of the Marseille Center for Particle Physics of the Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics of the National Center for Scientific Research (Marseille, France), PhD in Physical and Mathematical Sciences, were opponents. “Sergey Belov’s thesis has great scientific, technological and practical significance, since he took part in many pioneering works on the development of monitoring large computer systems, on the management of distributed data of large-scale scientific projects, on the creation of Big Data analytics platforms and the JINR Digital EcoSystem (DES),” Vladimir Korenkov underlined in his comment on the results of the defense. In large-scale scientific experiments in the field of high-energy physics, there are a number of key tasks, including physical modeling, data storage and the organization of access to it, as well as the organization of distributed computing. Sergey Belov proposed an approach to automating some stages of physical event modeling in high-energy physics, which is based on describing metainformation about events for transfer between processing stages and on using a knowledge base in a distributed computing environment. He elaborated new methods, models, algorithms and software to create a system for storing and accessing modeled physical data for experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, with the aim of enhancing the intellectual level of data analysis. Within his thesis, he created a specialized knowledge base of simulated events, MCDB, for use in a distributed computing environment. The developed Monte Carlo modeling event base and modeling metainformation description tools were successfully employed to increase the automation level of the formal modeling chain in the CMS experiment in 2010-2013, and the developed HepML markup language is used by the CompHEP and CalcHEP generator programs. As Vladimir Korenkov pointed out, Sergey Belov actively participated in pioneering works at the LHC to create the Worlwide LHC Computing Grid monitoring system on a novel technological platform, to develop the ProdSys2 physical modeling and analysis support system, as well as to elaborate the ATLAS Grid Information System for distributed computing and support data transfer monitoring within the Dashboard project. Sergey Belov formulated an approach to creating the scalable monitoring of ATLAS experiment data transfer in a distributed computing environment. The software packages developed on top of this approach are used in ATLAS in the new CERN data transfer monitoring system, MONIT. Sergey Belov also developed tools to analyze the statistics of access to ATLAS experiment data. These works were the first to introduce Big Data analytics methods and technologies. In addition, within the thesis, a method for analyzing demand for datasets in globally distributed repositories of the ATLAS experiment was implemented in the form of a software package, it is currently applied to determine the effectiveness of data management strategies and their optimization. Vladimir Korenkov highlighted the enormous amount of work done by Sergey Belov on the way to defending his thesis and his ability to implement large-scale tasks that no one had ever taken on before. Sergey Belov started working at MLIT in 2003, being a student at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). At the same time, computing projects (LCG - LHC Computing GRID, EGEE - Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) started to be actively implemented at the Large Hadron Collider, as well as the Russian grid segment (Consortium RDIG - Russian Data-Intensive Grid) began to be created. “Sergey Belov actively joined this activity and in a short time, together with another MIPT master’s student Igor Tkachev, completed pioneering work, namely, they created a system for monitoring and accounting for the usage of RDIG resources. Later, Sergey Belov participated in many projects and demonstrated extraordinary abilities and talent in implementing the most daring and promising ideas, only some of which were included in his thesis,” Vladimir Korenkov emphasized. Sergey Belov was the main executor of works on the creation and modernization of the grid monitoring system for the Scientific and Technical Program of the Union State of Russia and Belarus, SKIF-GRID, the system for monitoring and accounting for resource usage for the GridNNS project (creation of a grid infrastructure for the national nanotechnology network), coordinated work on the creation of a data management system for the Russian Grid Network. Having generalized the methods created to solve high-energy physics tasks and intended for effective research in various fields of science using Big Data technologies, Sergey Belov elaborated an architecture and created a prototype of a digital platform for analyzing complex socio-economic systems. Based on this prototype, applied studies on the Russian labor market and topics of publications in scientific journals were conducted. “Since 2016, Sergey has been involved in the project to develop the Big Data platform for a wide range of large-scale tasks and has dealt with methods for the intelligent analysis of natural language texts. He was one of the leaders of the project “Development of an information and analytical system for monitoring and analyzing labor market needs for university graduates on the basis of Big Data analytics”, the results of which are of great practical importance and are used in the social navigator for professions and salaries in Russian regions (a joint project of the MIA “Russia Today” and Plekhanov Russian University of Economics) and in studies by the Federal State Budgetary Institution “All-Russian Research Institute of Labor” of the Ministry of Labor of Russia. As one of the main executors, he actively participated in the project on the development of technologies and platforms to solve the tasks of the digital economy and scientific projects of megascience class on the basis of the synthesis of Big Data technologies, supercomputer technologies, data lakes and machine learning,” Vladimir Korenkov said. At present, Sergey Belov heads the MLIT Sector of the Development and Maintenance of the DES in the Scientific and Technical Department of External Communications and Distributed Information Systems, where he leads a large project to create the JINR Digital EcoSystem and takes part in the creation of a Big Data analytics platform, as well as continues to work in computing for physical experiments, including the SPD experiment in the NICA megascience project. “I would like to express my gratitude to my permanent scientific supervisor Vladimir Vasilyevich Korenkov. I saw how the Laboratory was evolving under his leadership, this was both a high motivation and an example for me. I am very grateful to the Laboratory’s Dissertation Council and, surely, to its secretary Elena Valerievna Zemlyanaya for their enormous help in preparing the defense of my thesis, as well as for comprehensive support. My scientific life has been tied to the Laboratory of Information Technologies since my student days. This is a unique place not only due to the traditionally high, world-class level of scientific research and the powerful computing infrastructure, but, above all, due to the atmosphere of goodwill and scientific search in the Laboratory’s team,” Sergey Belov underlined. The general opinion expressed at Sergey Belov’s defense by both the opponents and experts was that the work significantly exceeded the level required for awarding the academic degree of Candidate of Sciences in its relevance, scale of the work done and pioneering nature of the research.
