HEPiX Spring meeting in Lugano

HEPiX Spring 2025 (Lugano) key takeaways

• HEPiX is a long-established 4–5 day workshop held twice a year by and for system administrators, managers and integrators.
• Attendance varies but averages about 100 participants
• Contributions are organised in tracks but all tracks are presented plenary
• We welcome all contributions including work in progress or tales along lines “we tried but failed”

Spring workshop hosted by CSCS in Lugano

• Great attendance with over 120 participants; 80+ contributions; a full program.
• See https://indico.cern.ch/event/1477299/
• Nikhef had a strong delegation: Dennis, Sil, Emily, Jeff, Daniël G., Tristan, Andrew.

The following are personal notes contributed by some of our colleagues.

Daniël

• Gave a talk about his old analysis-code:
  • There is a lot of performance improvement that can be achieved in end-user analysis code.
  • C++ is not the right programming for (most) physicists.
• A week-long conference can be intense: make sure you don’t arrive already tired.
• There is a lot of fun work going on, on many different subjects. HEPiX is a good way of learning about these!

Jeff

• Gave a talk about implementation of job / process caps in HTCondor
• Spoke with the HEPSCORE team about their results for Nikhef (and connected with Emily)

• Was slightly disappointed in the “technical evolution” session, had expected more fireworks
• Was convinced by Alessandro di Girolamo that we should be more worried (as we approach HL-LHC) about support of individual users than about proliferation of Analysis Facilities.
• Had what was maybe the best tiramisu he ever tasted.

Andrew

• A personal highlight: Preserving IT History for more than a decade at CC-IN2P3, Dr Fabien Wernli.
• On storage: lots of talks about tape storage and an interesting vendor talk on how they see the near future of storage technology and how tape has foreseeable improvements of storage density and disc not so much.

Sil

• Found it well organised with

  • talks clustered by topic;
  • regular breaks for networking and mental refreshment;
  • plenty of social events.

  Good opportunity to see more of the HEP community and meet some people from other meetings (like the WLCG SOC Workgroup or HTCondor Week)

• Thought Fabio Zambrino (CSCS) gave an interesting talk titled “Cybersecurity at the Speed of HPC - Monitoring and Incident Response”, which gave some insight about their toolbox and setup. Some of the tools he mentioned might be worth a look for our CSIRT and SOC.

• A week-long conference can be intense: make sure to also schedule some time for leisure activities – or do the things you would normally do at home – and take advantage of what the area has to offer

  Example: run up a mountain to add an extra dimension (Z) to the trip?

Conclusions

• HEPiX is very much alive
• Attendence was a good mixture of the usual crowd and some fresh new faces
• CERN had a large delegation and many contributions, but doubts remain about their commitment to the twice-a-year schedule

See you at Next HEPiX?

Lanzhou, Gansu, China Nov 3 - Nov 7, 2025