arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Dmitri Konstantinov.
We review the main software and computing challenges for the Monte Carlo physics event generators used by the LHC experiments, in view of the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) physics programme. This paper has been prepared by the HEP Software Foundation (HSF) Physics Event Generator Working Group as an input to the LHCC review of HL-LHC computing, which has started in May 2020.
Common and community software packages, such as ROOT, Geant4 and event generators have been a key part of the LHC's success so far and continued development and optimisation will be critical in the future. The challenges are driven by an ambitious physics programme, notably the LHC accelerator upgrade to high-luminosity, HL-LHC, and the corresponding detector upgrades of ATLAS and CMS. In this document we address the issues for software that is used in multiple experiments (usually even more widely than ATLAS and CMS) and maintained by teams of developers who are either not linked to a particular experiment or who contribute to common software within the context of their experiment activity. We also give space to general considerations for future software and projects that tackle upcoming challenges, no matter who writes it, which is an area where community convergence on best practice is extremely useful.
In high-energy physics, Monte Carlo event generators (MCEGs) are used to simulate the interactions of high energy particles. MCEG event records store the information on the simulated particles and their relationships, and thus reflects the simulated evolution of physics phenomena in each collision event. We present the HepMC3 library, a next-generation framework for MCEG event record encoding and manipulation, which builds on the functionality of its widely-used predecessors to enable more sophisticated algorithms for event-record analysis. By comparison to previous versions, the event record structure has been simplified, while adding the possibility to encode arbitrary information. The I/O functionality has been extended to support common input and output formats of various HEP MCEGs, including formats used in Fortran MCEGs, the formats established by the HepMC2 library, and binary formats such as ROOT; custom input or output handlers may also be used. HepMC3 is already supported by popular modern MCEGs and can replace the older HepMC versions in many others.