arXiv subjects

Gordon T. Watts

Publications and source records attributed to Gordon T. Watts.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Evaluating Query Languages and Systems for High-Energy Physics Data [Extended Version]

In the domain of high-energy physics (HEP), query languages in general and SQL in particular have found limited acceptance. This is surprising since HEP data analysis matches the SQL model well: the data is fully structured and queried using mostly standard operators. To gain insights on why this is the case, we perform a comprehensive analysis of six diverse, general-purpose data processing platforms using an HEP benchmark. The result of the evaluation is an interesting and rather complex picture of existing solutions: Their query languages vary greatly in how natural and concise HEP query patterns can be expressed. Furthermore, most of them are also between one and two orders of magnitude slower than the domain-specific system used by particle physicists today. These observations suggest that, while database systems and their query languages are in principle viable tools for HEP, significant work remains to make them relevant to HEP researchers.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

Towards Real-World Applications of ServiceX, an Analysis Data Transformation System

One of the biggest challenges in the High-Luminosity LHC (HL- LHC) era will be the significantly increased data size to be recorded and analyzed from the collisions at the ATLAS and CMS experiments. ServiceX is a software R&D project in the area of Data Organization, Management and Access of the IRIS- HEP to investigate new computational models for the HL- LHC era. ServiceX is an experiment-agnostic service to enable on-demand data delivery specifically tailored for nearly-interactive vectorized analyses. It is capable of retrieving data from grid sites, on-the-fly data transformation, and delivering user-selected data in a variety of different formats. New features will be presented that make the service ready for public use. An ongoing effort to integrate ServiceX with a popular statistical analysis framework in ATLAS will be described with an emphasis of a practical implementation of ServiceX into the physics analysis pipeline.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2021

Learning from the Pandemic: the Future of Meetings in HEP and Beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic has by-and-large prevented in-person meetings since March 2020. While the increasing deployment of effective vaccines around the world is a very positive development, the timeline and pathway to "normality" is uncertain and the "new normal" we will settle into is anyone's guess. Particle physics, like many other scientific fields, has more than a year of experience in holding virtual meetings, workshops, and conferences. A great deal of experimentation and innovation to explore how to execute these meetings effectively has occurred. Therefore, it is an appropriate time to take stock of what we as a community learned from running virtual meetings and discuss possible strategies for the future. Continuing to develop effective strategies for meetings with a virtual component is likely to be important for reducing the carbon footprint of our research activities, while also enabling greater diversity and inclusion for participation. This report summarizes a virtual two-day workshop on Virtual Meetings held May 5-6, 2021 which brought together experts from both inside and outside of high-energy physics to share their experiences and practices with organizing and executing virtual workshops, and to develop possible strategies for future meetings as we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. This report outlines some of the practices and tools that have worked well which we hope will serve as a valuable resource for future virtual meeting organizers in all scientific fields.

physics.soc-ph↗