Computational Frontier

Software and Computing are an integral part of the science process. High Energy Physics traditionally had the largest computing resource needs and subsequently most complex software stack in science. This is not true anymore, with many other science domains predicting equal or larger resource needs. The Computational Frontier will assess the software and computing needs of the High Energy Physics community emphasizing common needs and common solutions across the frontiers. We want to gain an overall understanding of the community’s needs and discuss common solutions to them in the context of current and future solutions from the HEP community, other science disciplines and industry solutions. Our focus is to facilitate discussions amongst all frontiers and don’t separate them into individual groups.

Snowmass Pause: Report Time schedule and White Paper Deadlines

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Snowmass Report and the Community Summer Study meeting (CSS) will be delayed by one year until 2022, see the Official Announcement here.

The Computational Frontier plans to pause until August 2021. This means that there will be no frontier-level activities during this period.

Some of the topical groups will continue work already started on existing defined directions, but with meetings at a lower frequency. Other topical groups will pause their work. Any topical group activities will be advertised in advance via email and Slack.

The Small Experiments Software and Computing Workshop we had started planning will be rescheduled for after the restart of frontier activities.

To allow topical group conveners sufficient time to consider white papers, we ask all who wish to contribute to submit (via email to topical group conveners) at least a title and abstract by the end of January, 2022. This is to ensure that all relevant areas are covered. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with the topical group conveners with ideas or plans for white papers. The general Snowmass deadlines apply.

Time Schedule

• January 31, 2022: White Paper submission to arXiv (preferred) or at least title and abstract to topical group conveners
• March 15, 2022: Official deadline for white paper submission to arXiv
• May 31, 2022: Preliminary reports by the Topical Groups
• June 30, 2022: Preliminary reports by the Frontiers
• July, 2022: Snowmass Community Summer Study (CSS) at UW-Seattle
• September 30, 2022: All final reports by TGs and Frontiers
• October 31, 2022: Snowmass Book and the on-line archive documents

Computational Frontier Report Structure

• Frontier Summary (~20-50 pages)
• Topical Group Reports (~20-50 pages per Topical Group)

The Frontier Summary will be further summarized in the Snowmass 2020 executive summary, see Snowmass 2020 Report guidelines

Defining topics and key questions

• Topical Group conveners will define topics and key questions to be included in Topical Group reports
  • LOIs will be used to gain overview of community input to inform topics and key questions of the reports and will be augmented by Topical Group conveners to form complete picture
    • LOIs will not be referenced in the reports, but are publicly available
  • Community work (meetings, workshops, discussions) completes the overview
• White papers
  • White papers reinforce topics or add topics that have not yet been included
  • White papers are referenced in the reports
    • Last Snowmass, the Computational Frontier had approximately 10 white papers, not every topical group had a white paper
    • We are aiming to support most key questions and topics through white papers

Process: combine top-down with bottom up

• Start with Topical Group conveners defining topics and key questions
  • Topical Group conveners solicit white papers to support topics and key questions
• Regular check-points to include community input and check consensus on topics and key questions
  • Use meetings, workshops and discussions as check-points
  • Introduce deadline for white paper drafts
  • Introduce deadline for white papers

Frontier Conveners

• Main Slack channel: “#comp_frontier_topics”

Topical groups

• Instructions to join a mailing list
• Instructions to join the Snowmass2021 Slack (at the end of the page)

Bibliography

A list of documents/papers relevant to the Computational Frontier can be found here: Bibliography of Documents/Papers relevant to the Computational Frontier

Report Drafts

Please note that these are draft reports. We welcome your feedback! If you have comments or suggestions, please send an email to the topical group / frontier conveners, topical group e-group, and/or slack channel.

• CompF Frontier Report (Google doc for feedback on v0 Google doc for feedback on v1 summary Google doc for feedback on v1 full report): v0 v1 (summary only) v1 (full report) v1 (full report diff)

• CompF1: v0arXiv
• CompF2: v0 v1arXiv
• CompF3: v0arXiv
• CompF4: v0 v1arXiv
• CompF5: v0arXiv
• CompF6: v0arXiv
• CompF7: v0arXiv

Liaisons

Software and Computing are used by most of the SnowMass2012 frontiers. We setup liaisons to keep in close contact:

Meetings and Event Calendar

• Computational Frontier Workshop August 10 and 11: https://indico.fnal.gov/event/43829/
• Computational Frontier Indico Category: https://indico.fnal.gov/category/1107/
• Computing Frontier Event Calendar, or see it below:

Submitted LOI

Letters of Intent submitted to Energy Frontier (as primary frontier) shown in this link. Here is the list of submitted LOIs that include CompF as primary or secondary topic. First index before “/” corresponds to the primary frontier used for the submission. Please go to the “topical” group to see the LOIs submitted to specific topics. Documents with “CompF0” will be shown only here (no specific topic).