41.7HCApr 13
Enabling users to work sustainably on shared institute computing resourcesNiclas Eich, Johannes Erdmann, Martin Erdmann et al.
The VISPA project is a self-managed, mid-scale computing cluster that supports physics data analysis in research and teaching. Because the cluster is housed in a 1970s institute building with limited retrofit options, conventional efficiency upgrades would yield only minor energy savings. We therefore target sustainability primarily through user-centric measures. A monitoring system now records per-job energy consumption, while real-time data on the renewable share of the German power grid enable `green-window' scheduling. Users can query their individual energy consumption and carbon footprints, receive weekly reports, and tag jobs by project for aggregate accounting; memory records from previous runs help avoid oversubscription. All options are voluntary, fostering a cultural shift rather than imposing hard constraints. A simulation framework evaluates the potential impact of these measures. Together, the technological and behavioral interventions aim at medium- to long-term reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by increasing resource awareness within the scientific community.
LGJul 1, 2021
Shared Data and Algorithms for Deep Learning in Fundamental PhysicsLisa Benato, Erik Buhmann, Martin Erdmann et al.
We introduce a Python package that provides simply and unified access to a collection of datasets from fundamental physics research - including particle physics, astroparticle physics, and hadron- and nuclear physics - for supervised machine learning studies. The datasets contain hadronic top quarks, cosmic-ray induced air showers, phase transitions in hadronic matter, and generator-level histories. While public datasets from multiple fundamental physics disciplines already exist, the common interface and provided reference models simplify future work on cross-disciplinary machine learning and transfer learning in fundamental physics. We discuss the design and structure and line out how additional datasets can be submitted for inclusion. As showcase application, we present a simple yet flexible graph-based neural network architecture that can easily be applied to a wide range of supervised learning tasks. We show that our approach reaches performance close to dedicated methods on all datasets. To simplify adaptation for various problems, we provide easy-to-follow instructions on how graph-based representations of data structures, relevant for fundamental physics, can be constructed and provide code implementations for several of them. Implementations are also provided for our proposed method and all reference algorithms.
COMP-PHJul 8, 2018
Machine Learning in High Energy Physics Community White PaperKim Albertsson, Piero Altoe, Dustin Anderson et al.
Machine learning has been applied to several problems in particle physics research, beginning with applications to high-level physics analysis in the 1990s and 2000s, followed by an explosion of applications in particle and event identification and reconstruction in the 2010s. In this document we discuss promising future research and development areas for machine learning in particle physics. We detail a roadmap for their implementation, software and hardware resource requirements, collaborative initiatives with the data science community, academia and industry, and training the particle physics community in data science. The main objective of the document is to connect and motivate these areas of research and development with the physics drivers of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider and future neutrino experiments and identify the resource needs for their implementation. Additionally we identify areas where collaboration with external communities will be of great benefit.