DeKalb, IL – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a $2.6 million grant to Northern Illinois University and the University of Illinois Chicago to provide classroom training and research opportunities in computational high energy physics (HEP).
The CERN Data Center. Photo credit: CERN.
Over the next five years, the award is intended to provide two dozen master’s-level students in physics and computer science with stipends, tuition reimbursement and opportunities to collaborate with scientists at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“The great thing about this grant is that the overwhelming majority of the funding goes directly to students,” said NIU Professor Jahred Adelman, a particle physicist who is leading the grant project. It’s known as the Chicagoland Computational Traineeship in High Energy Particle Physics, or C2-the-P2, for short. NIU physics faculty members Vishnu Zutshi, Jerry Blazey and Mike Eads also are involved.
C2-the-P2 is one of three projects that were selected by competitive peer review under a DOE funding opportunity announcement. The total funding is $10 million for the three projects lasting up to five years in duration, with $1 million in Fiscal Year 2022 dollars and outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations.
HEP relies on increasingly complex software and computing to deliver scientific discoveries. The DOE funding supports training of the next generation of scientists to develop and maintain U.S. competitiveness globally in these important areas.
A cutaway of one of the dipole magnets that are used to steer proton beams around the Large Hadron Collider ring at CERN. Photo credit: CERN.
“Future high energy physics discoveries will require large accurate simulations and efficient collaborative software,” said Regina Rameika, DOE associate director of science for high energy physics. “These traineeships will educate the scientists and engineers necessary to design, develop, deploy and maintain the software and computing infrastructure essential for the future of high energy physics.”
Adelman and other particle physicists use particle accelerator experiments to understand how the smallest and most fundamental building blocks of the universe interact and talk to each other. Particle accelerators are devices that speed up the particles that make up all matter in the universe and collide them together or into a target. This allows scientists to study those particles and the forces that shape them.
One challenge at particle accelerator labs such as CERN in Europe, where Adelman conducts his research, and closer to home at Fermilab, is to develop new computational tools needed to parse and understand enormous amounts of data generated by particle accelerator experiments.
“There’s clearly a need for young scientists who are excited by particle physics and want to also learn software and computing skills,” Adelman said. “With this program, NIU and UIC are partnering with Fermilab and Argonne to train students who will develop expertise that really is needed for our field to succeed.”
HEP experiments at some of the world’s most advanced laboratories use software development that requires detailed knowledge and understanding of computing hardware systems. Traineeship students will work on and advance collaborative software environments that enable the sharing of tools and datasets in a coherent and efficient manner for hundreds or thousands of scientific users. Students will also develop software and algorithms that can take advantage of increasingly parallel computing platforms either synchronously or asynchronously
One student has already started in the traineeship at NIU. Both NIU and UIC are developing new courses for the program, and the institutions will jointly sponsor professional development opportunities and a computational seminar specifically for program participants.
Beyond skills acquired in the classroom, student theses will be devoted to computational HEP projects that are carried out with guidance from computational HEP experts. Projects will be in three target areas of need: hardware-software co-design, collaborative software infrastructure, and high-performance software and algorithms. Students will be able to graduate and move into the workforce or stay on to get their Ph.Ds. in HEP.
“Particle physics experiments provide incredible training opportunities for students,” Adelman said. “Students develop skills that are vital to our field and to all sorts of areas of the economy, such as data science, high-performance computing and optimization of new computing architectures. Some stay in academia, and others get great jobs that contribute enormously to our economy.”
Media Contact: Tom Parisi
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