Using the Mass Storage System at ZIB within I3HP

In the framework of I3HP there are two Transnational Access Activities related to Computational Hadron Physics. One of these activities is access to the mass storage system at Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fuer Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB). European lattice physics collaborations can apply for mass storage capacity in order to store and share their configurations or other data (see http://www.zib.de/i3hp/). In this paper formal and technical aspects of usage as well as the conformance to the International Lattice DataGrid (ILDG) are explained.Comment: Talk given at the Workshop on Computational Hadron Physics, Nicosia, Cyprus, 14--17 September 200

Projet: Jet Cross Sections in Deeply Inelastic Electron Proton Scattering (VERSION 4.1)

PROJET is a parton level Monte Carlo program for the calculation of jet cross sections in deeply inelastic electron proton scattering. In its present version it contains the Born level diagrams for the production of (1+1), (2+1) and (3+1) jets and the next-to-leading order corrections for the production cross sections of (1+1) and (2+1) jets for all polarisations of the exchanged virtual photon. In particular, the full angular correlations between the lepton and jet momenta are implemented. The program permits the application of acceptance cuts on all external momenta. For this purpose, the program creates an event record accessible to the user program with all momenta in the laboratory frame and in the center of momentum frame of the proton and the virtual photon. This option is indispensable for phenomenological studies because of the strong dependence of cross sections on phase space restrictions and the large uncertainty of fragmentation corrections in the proton direction. Since PROJET uses the Monte Carlo integration method for the evaluation of phase space integrals, the weights of the generated events can be used to produce distributions of observables related to jet momenta.Comment: 28 pages (LaTeX), CERN-TH.7420/9

Phenomenology Tools on Cloud Infrastructures using OpenStack

We present a new environment for computations in particle physics phenomenology employing recent developments in cloud computing. On this environment users can create and manage "virtual" machines on which the phenomenology codes/tools can be deployed easily in an automated way. We analyze the performance of this environment based on "virtual" machines versus the utilization of "real" physical hardware. In this way we provide a qualitative result for the influence of the host operating system on the performance of a representative set of applications for phenomenology calculations.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures; information on memory usage included, as well as minor modifications. Version to appear in EPJ

The AliEn system, status and perspectives

AliEn is a production environment that implements several components of the Grid paradigm needed to simulate, reconstruct and analyse HEP data in a distributed way. The system is built around Open Source components, uses the Web Services model and standard network protocols to implement the computing platform that is currently being used to produce and analyse Monte Carlo data at over 30 sites on four continents. The aim of this paper is to present the current AliEn architecture and outline its future developments in the light of emerging standards.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, Word, 10 figures. PSN MOAT00

The Fractured Memory of a Mind’s Eye

The work I create is informed by questioning reality/identity, the fractalizing planes of existence our essence occupies, and the artifacts of memory experience navigating through space time. While existing in this realm of oversaturated media and neon glow, I question the effects of pervasive data systems overloading or programming the mental software we possess. My work includes humor as a means of exploring these conventions while also displaying psychedelic surrealist imagery to help break away from the conscious prison this existence births our concept apparatuses within

IVOA Recommendation: VOTable Format Definition Version 1.3

This document describes the structures making up the VOTable standard. The main part of this document describes the adopted part of the VOTable standard; it is followed by appendices presenting extensions which have been proposed and/or discussed, but which are not part of the standard

Optimal Compression of Floating-point Astronomical Images Without Significant Loss of Information

We describe a compression method for floating-point astronomical images that gives compression ratios of 6 -- 10 while still preserving the scientifically important information in the image. The pixel values are first preprocessed by quantizing them into scaled integer intensity levels, which removes some of the uncompressible noise in the image. The integers are then losslessly compressed using the fast and efficient Rice algorithm and stored in a portable FITS format file. Quantizing an image more coarsely gives greater image compression, but it also increases the noise and degrades the precision of the photometric and astrometric measurements in the quantized image. Dithering the pixel values during the quantization process can greatly improve the precision of measurements in the images. This is especially important if the analysis algorithm relies on the mode or the median which would be similarly quantized if the pixel values are not dithered. We perform a series of experiments on both synthetic and real astronomical CCD images to quantitatively demonstrate that the magnitudes and positions of stars in the quantized images can be measured with the predicted amount of precision. In order to encourage wider use of these image compression methods, we have made available a pair of general-purpose image compression programs, called fpack and funpack, which can be used to compress any FITS format image.Comment: Accepted PAS