Offline & Computing Week, CERN, October 2023

The main event of my visit to CERN, Offline Software and Computing Week (indico), concluded with many useful discussions regarding the present and future of CompOps and in particular the Production and Reprocessing team (P&R), one of the teams under the CompOps umbrella, coordinated by our own Zhangqier, myself, and Jen Adelman-McCarthy from Fermilab. One of the main topics of the discussions, and of particular importance to me, was P&R’s codebase, which had fallen into a state of disorganization and outdatedness as the team had to focus more on urgent operational issues and lacked person-power to organize serious development efforts. What I had thought was an internal problem that only really concerned our team, received a lot of attention by the CompOps community, with a lot of feedback, ideas, and collaboration planned between teams to fix this important issue. As a result, the P&R team is currently undergoing a thorough self-review of its codebase, and will develop a plan, along with other people from CompOps, for its future. This effort to re-organize the codebase will not be easy, quick, or painless, but will greatly improve the productivity of the team, give us the chance to optimize our systems, and develop closer relationships with other teams from CompOps. It will also be a chance for team members to develop new skills in development, as we seek to improve our code practices and use of state-of-the-art tools, and will also make onboarding of new members easier as the code will be better organized and documented. Aside from this important topic, we had the chance to engage in thought-provoking conversations regarding monitoring and production with many other people from CompOps, and heard about many new developments in computing: from L1 scouting, Julia for analysis, a new Serbian Tier-1, NextGen trigger, and much more.

While I was at CERN, the inauguration of the new Science Gateway was undergoing preparations: I missed it by just one day, and hope to be back soon to visit it. Science education and communication should always remain of interest to CERN.

I was able however to get a guided trip (by P&R’s own Hasan Özturk, pictured below) to the Antimatter Factory, home of many experiments, among which ALPHA, which was recently featured in many news outlets due to a measurement of the influence of gravity on antimatter.