Nikhef researchers Wouter Verkerke and Sascha Caron (ATLAS group) have both been awarded a large grant by the Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC). Their proposals for projects were accepted within the framework of the ASDI (Accelerating Scientific Discovery) call and will each be supported with €500K. The projects are scheduled to start in 2016 and are described below.
‘Automated Parallel Calculation of Collaborative Statistical Models’
Wouter Verkerke: "This is fantastic news. The funding, manpower and expertise provided by the eScience center will provide a major boost to RooFit technical development that will power many of the upcoming physics results of run-2 of the LHC. It will strengthen our Higgs research at Nikhef, but also promote RooFits use outside particle physics."
‘iDark: The intelligent Dark Matter Survey’
Sascha Caron: “iDark is a new platform to combine expertise in particle physics, astrophysics, eScience and machine learning, with the objective of determining the nature of dark matter by combining all data available worldwide. With the help of such eScience machinery we will establish one of the most promising ways to pinpoint dark matter in the coming years.
Short descriptions of the projects:
‘Automated Parallel Calculation of Collaborative Statistical Models’
Dr. W. Verkerke (FOM/Nikhef)
"Combining measurements to obtain better and more precise results has become a big business at the LHC. Both the discovery of the Higgs boson and the recent ATLAS/CMS combined measurement of Higgs properties are
prime examples of high-profile results that follow from combinations of many individual measurements.
The key to making teams of scientists work together, both inside collaborations as well as between collaborations, has been to formulate their data analysis results in a common language, RooFit. RooFits technical abilities have allowed LHC physicists to realize very ambitious projects: current Higgs models describe hundreds of signal and control samples with thousands of parameters.
The goal of this eScience project is to scale RooFits technical abilities in two ways – to make the evaluation of models faster through parallel execution,
and to allow for even more ambitious, larger combinations by introducing novel ways to describe individual measurements in a more scalable way. This will pave the way for new physics results in run-2 of the LHC, but also for novel uses of RooFit outside particle physics.
‘iDark: The intelligent Dark Matter Survey’ – Dr. S. Caron (Radboud University/Nikhef):
Astronomical observations have established that more than 80% of all matter in the Universe is made up of Dark Matter (DM). The determination of the nature of Dark Matter is one of the most important tasks of Physics and Astronomy; it will most likely be the result of a combination of all worldwide available experimental data. Combining the worldwide data within the most general models of Dark Matter is the main objective of this project. This will test the models, determine the allowed parameter space for Dark Matter and help focus the effort for experimental searches. Finding viable solutions and exploring in a statistically convergent manner huge DM-model parameter spaces is the challenge, which we like to attack with advanced eScience methods. Technical solutions to these questions have also multiple applications in society. We will explore, compare and design algorithms to find (tiny, fragmented) solution areas in large multidimensional parameter spaces. Furthermore, we will explore methods to accelerate the computing machinery for DM searches. Finally we plan to investigate the possibility to make a (web-accessible) largely automated “DM model” database. With the help of such eScience machinery we will establish one of the most promising ways to pinpoint DM in the next years.
About the project calls of the Netherlands eScience Center
The purpose of the ASDI (Accelerating Scientiefic Discovey) call is to enable domain scientists, working in application fields of Environment & Sustainability, Humanities & Social Sciences, Life Sciences & eHealth, or Physics & Beyond, to address compute-intensive and/or data-driven problems within their research.
Large Projects are supported to the value of €500K (combined cash and in kind provision of eScience Research Engineers) and result from annual peer-reviewed project calls. The projects are collaborations with research teams from multiple Dutch academic groups and represent the latest step in the continued development of NLeSC’s project portfolio.
More information
Nikhef communications department – mail – 020 5925075
Read the original NLeSC press release here