This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Particle physics stands at the threshold of a new era of discovery as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins colliding-beam operations. With the highest-energy collisions ever created in a laboratory environment, the CMS collaboration (about 1600 physicists world-wide) will study some of the most fundamental questions of our time, such as the origin of mass, the possible existence of supersymmetry, and the hypothetical existence of extra spatial dimensions. This award allows nine universities (University of Chicago, Columbia University, California State University at Fresno(lead institute), Hampton University, New York University, Northern Illinois University, Michigan State University, Stony Brook University, and the University of Washington) to develop and build the U.S. ATLAS Physics Analysis Instrument (APAI) which is envisioned as a distributed computing facility comprised of a shared array of university-based dedicated analysis computers utilizing the Open Science Grid infrastructure. The APAI will provide a unique opportunity for university faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate students to participate and make transformative discoveries in experimental particle physics using data from the ATLAS experiment.
This award provides the means for the consortium institutions to enhance their prestige and compete at an international level. The cutting edge research to be performed at the LHC has the potential to re-invigorate the interest of undergraduates in science. The APAI offers a unique tool to integrate educational opportunities for undergraduates with some of the most exciting and compelling scientific research being done today. Some members of this consortium have a tradition of serving underrepresented groups, African Americans, Hispanics, and "first-generation" college students, thus one expects the compelling nature of the research being proposed will allow them to attract these underrepresented students. Furthermore, the APAI represents a transformational way of viewing and using distributed clusters and could lead to significant improvements in the way large collaborations approach physics analyses.
(LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. CERN was established in 1954 by European countries and is one of the world’s most prestigious and respected laboratories for scientific research. CERN is the birth place of many important discoveries, including two Nobel physics prizes and the World Wide Web by Tim Berners Lee which revolutionized the way people communicate with each other. Currently ~10,000 scientists from over 100 countries are doing their research at CERN, including over 1000 US scientists from ~100 US institutions. After more than 10 years of construction, the 10 billion dollar LHC started collision in Nov. of 2009 and will remain as the world’s most powerful collider until at least 2030. LHC has been one of the most ambitious and exciting scientific projects in human history. The goal of LHC is to search for new physics beyond the current known physics frame work. Scientists’ expectations for discoveries at the LHC include the Higgs particle which is responsible for the origin of mass, dark matter, extra dimensions, and many other new physics scenarios. The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) are the flagship LHC experiments designed to search for such possible new physics. Operation of LHC and ATLAS/CMS experiments has been the highest priority in the field of experimental high energy physics. The discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson by ATLAS and CMS experiments on 7/4/2012 made headline news in all major news media around the world. Figure 1 shows the LHC which is located about 300 feet underneath the border by Switzerland and France. Figure 2 shows the ATLAS detector which is the largest HEP detector ever built and is roughly the size of a 6 story building. The ATLAS collaboration consists of ~3000 physicists from ~200 institutions of 38 countries all over the world. Among them there are ~500 physicists from ~45 US universities and national labs. The 9 universities supported by this NSF MRI grant includes University of Chicago, Columbia University, California State University, Fresno, Hampton University, University of Northern Illinois University, New York University, Michigan State University, Stony Brook University, and University of Washington. The ATLAS research work at these 9 universities has been supported by NSF Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) program. ATLAS experiment has been taking data with world record high energy which allows researchers to trace back in time to the very beginning of the universe, i.e. the Big-Bang. The ATLAS data exceeds 10 PB (10,000 TB) and needs to be shared by thousands of physicists from all over the world. This has been done through a multi-tier grid computing system. CERN is the Tier 0 center where all the raw data is taken and processed. Then multiple ATLAS data are stored in Tier 1 and 2 centers. There are 5 Tier 1 centers in the world: 3 in Europe, 1 in Asia and 1 in the US (the Brookhaven National Lab). There are 5 Tier 2 centers under each Tier 2 center. Each ATLAS institution is a Tier 3 which has a grid computing cluster. Through the Tier 3 cluster, ATLAS faculty, postdoctoral researchers and students in the institution can access the huge ATLAS data and computing resources in the ATLAS grid computing system for ATLAS research work. The goal of this grant and project is to develop and build the US ATLAS Physics Analysis Instrument (APAI) to help physicists at the 9 NSF-funded ATLAS institutions to analyze ATLAS data from the LHC. This effort is part of the overall US ATLAS Tier 3 program. The procedures for building up the US ATLAS Tier 3 clusters are well developed and documented in https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/AtlasTier3g, https://atlaswww.hep.anl.gov/twiki/bin/view/UsAtlasTier3/Tier3gSetupGuide, https://atlaswww.hep.anl.gov/twiki/bin/view/UsAtlasTier3/HardwareRecommendations, etc. All the Tier 3 clusters at the 9 institutions were set up and operation for ATLAS research by 2011. Figure 3 shows the Tier 3 cluster at University of Stony Brook. These clusters have been heavily used by ATLAS physicists at the institutions which resulted many publications in top physics journals and contributed to all publications from ATLAS experiment. ATLAS publishes ~60 papers per year (see full publication list at https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic) For example, the Columbia Tier 3 cluster has been used for calorimeter online and offline Data Quality (DQ) monitoring which all ATLAS publications have benefited from these activities. Each ATLAS group of the 9 Consortium institutions of US APAI includes about 10 or more scientists, postdoc researchers and graduate students.
