This proposal is for a five-year program (2003-2007) to strengthen the software, computing and collaborative infrastructure of U.S. universities working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. This is an essential part of a broad effort to maximize the scientific return at the energy frontier at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The goal of this proposal is to realize the U.S. investment of the DOE and the NSF in building the CMS detector. To do so, U.S. physicists must exert leadership in operating and extracting new physics results from the completed detector using the new IT tools available to distant experimenters. The LHC will open a new regime in particle physics up to and beyond the TeV energy scale, made accessible for the first time by a combination of high luminosity of 1034 cm-2 s-1 and a proton-proton center of mass energy of 14 TeV. The unprecedented energy range and sensitivity of this new particle accelerator, combined with the special capabilities of the CMS experiment for particle detection and measurement, are expected to lead to discoveries of new elementary particles and novel behaviors of the fundamental forces. Such discoveries at the smallest distance scales could have revolutionary effects on our understanding of the unification of forces, the origin and stability of matter, the ultimate underpinnings of the observable universe, and the nature of space-time itself. The LHC will commence operation in 2007 with a scientific program that will continue for decades. U.S. physicists, who constitute approximately 25% of collaborating LHC scientists, are mostly based at U.S. universities. This simple fact underlies the basis of this proposal, namely that in order to fully exploit the ambitious and rich scientific program at the LHC, researchers at U.S. universities must have the necessary resources required for full participation in all phases of the scientific program during the LHC operational period. The proposed plan is to strengthen university infrastructure in four areas critical to the long-term success of the CMS research program: software and computing (S&C), maintenance and operations (M&O), detector upgrade research and development (R&D) and education and outreach (E/O). The plan presented here builds on the considerable intellectual and material resources at U.S. universities to create a university-laboratory partnership having unique potential for extracting scientific results from CMS. Critically important to this partnership is the development, in association with computer scientists, of Data Grids to provide a comprehensive framework for collaborative research and training, supporting coordinated data analysis on an unprecedented scale at facilities at many locations in the U.S. and around the world. This framework presents laboratory and university physicists and their students unparalleled opportunities to share research results with each other and with other scientists across the globe, including scientists in remote institutions or regions whose intellectual contributions to forefront research would normally be underrepresented.
