NPPS Leadership Team

[Torre Wenaus <wenaus AT gmail.com>]

FYI, one of two successful computational HEP training proposals we signed up with.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jason Nielsen <jnielsen AT ucsc.edu>
Date: Tue, Nov 1, 2022 at 5:04 PM
Subject: Starting the DOE Computational HEP Training program
To: Michael Hance <mhance AT ucsc.edu>, Tesla Jeltema <tesla AT ucsc.edu>, Carlos Maltzahn <carlosm AT ucsc.edu>, Schellman, Heidi <Heidi.Schellman AT oregonstate.edu>, Shih-Chieh Hsu <schsu AT uw.edu>, Mario Juric <mjuric AT uw.edu>, Andrew J Connolly <ajc AT astro.washington.edu>, Gordon T. Watts <gwatts AT uw.edu>, Haichen Wang <haichenwang AT lbl.gov>, Heather Gray <heather.gray AT berkeley.edu>, Timon Heim <theim AT lbl.gov>, Marjorie Shapiro <mdshapiro AT lbl.gov>, Paolo Calafiura <pcalafiura AT lbl.gov>, Charles Leggett <CGLeggett AT lbl.gov>, Benjamin Nachman <bpnachman AT lbl.gov>, Anyes Taffard <ataffard AT uci.edu>, Daniel Whiteson <daniel AT uci.edu>, Frank K Wuerthwein <fkw AT physics.ucsd.edu>, Javier Duarte <jduarte AT physics.ucsd.edu>, <ksarnold AT ucsd.edu>, Torre Wenaus <wenaus AT gmail.com>, Nhan V Tran <ntran AT fnal.gov>, scott snyder <scott.snyder AT cern.ch>, Marc F Paterno <paterno AT fnal.gov>, Cheng-Ju Stephen Lin <cjslin AT lbl.gov>, Peter Nugent <penugent AT lbl.gov>

Dear colleagues,

I received an update about the Computational HEP Training program from our DOE manager Jeremy Love. The award recommendation (not final funding) is making its way through the final steps of DOE approval, and the press release for the award announcements has been scheduled for November 9. We will prepare a press release that you can share on the same day with your campus/lab.

There are many items to prepare as we ramp up the program over the next few weeks. We are expecting to start a cohort of 6 graduate trainees in January 2023, but the timing of the financial subawards will depend on when funding arrives at UCSC. In the meantime, I will be reaching out to you about the following items. Please feel free to volunteer for any of them.

Program name: We made it this far without a cool name, but it would be useful to have a name to distinguish our training program from the other consortia, which are on the Eastern side of the Mississippi. Some suggestions I have heard so far are variations on CHEP: TCHEP (Traineeships in Computational High-Energy Physics), and PacCompHEP or PCHEP (Pacific…, because all of the universities are near the Pacific). If you would like to vote or suggest other names, please go to https://forms.gle/JxZ8oRNPny7DSB9TA to submit your choice.

Website and mailing lists: We can sponsor these at UCSC or with special URLs. If there are volunteers to help, I will appreciate it. Would it be useful to start a Slack channel, social media, Discourse? Part of our training program will be to train people to communicate via the media that are currently used in the community.

Institute Contact Board: In the proposal, we listed one person from each participating institute to serve as ICB representative. The ICB will meet soon to draft governance documents and a code of conduct for the consortium. Eventually the ICB will provide input on the program evaluation framework and reports.

Trainee recruitment and selection: The goal is to be prepared to select a cohort in early December. That means we can think now about potential candidates. We should aim to have an application format set up by Nov. 15, with an application deadline of Dec. 1. There was quite a bit of work done to think about a rubric that could be used for selection, keeping in mind our desire to spread out the trainees between the institutes.

Curriculum development and seminars: Heidi Schellman is taking the lead on developing curriculum for the planned summer school and the online training concentration modules. We will need subject experts to help identify the most important topics in Generic HEP modules, Topic concentration modules (following the technical areas below), and Communications. Our goal is to have one person from each institute contributing their ideas and helping to develop/test the materials. We also need a very small committee to organize a monthly seminar series for the trainees and interested collaborators.

Topical training/research areas: Each area has a core group of people to meet and discuss possible projects in lab/uni collaboration. Many of you were already named in the proposal as having interest in one of the following broad technical areas, independent of science program frontiers:

- Hardware-software co-design

- Collaborative software infrastructure

- High-performance software and algorithms

I will find one or two people in each area to set up the first meeting.

There is a lot of exciting work to do, but we are a large enough group that no single person has to take on too much. I hope that there will be something in the list above that matches your specific interest and expertise.

Looking forward to working with all of you,

Sincerely,

Jason Nielsen

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-- Torre Wenaus, BNL NPPS Group, ATLAS Experiment

-- BNL 510A 1-222 | 631-681-7892