Online production validation in a HEP environment

Abstract

In high energy physics (HEP) event simulations, petabytes of data are processed and stored requiring millions of CPU-years. This enormous demand for computing resources is handled by centers distributed worldwide, which form part of the LHC computing grid. The consumption of such an important amount of resources demands for an efficient production of simulation and for the early detection of potential errors. In this article we present a new monitoring framework for grid environments, which polls a measure of data quality during job execution. This online monitoring facilitates the early detection of configuration errors (specially in simulation parameters), and may thus contribute to significant savings in computing resources.

A fixed-target programme at the LHC for heavy-ion, hadron, spin and astroparticle physics: AFTER@LHC

“…With AFTER@LHC we expect precision studies of the charmonium, bottomonium and charmed meson production in pp, pA, and AA interactions. The measurement of nuclear modification factors R pA for heavy flavor mesons and quarkonium states in pA collisions is a powerful tool for constraining gluon nuclear parton distribution function (nPDF) in a nucleus [11,12] whose knowledge is essential to model in-medium interactions of heavy quarks. Figure 1 shows the current uncertainty on the gluon nPDF in the Xe nucleus along with the expected one after the inclusion of AFTER@LHC data.…”