BaBar simulation production - A millennium of work in under a year

The BaBar experiment requires simulated events beyond the ability of a single computing site to provide. This paper describes the evolution of simulation and job management methods to meet the physics community requirements and how production became distributed to use resources beyond any one computing center. The evolution of BaBar simulation along with the development of the distribution of the computing effort is described. As the computing effort is distributed to more sites there is a need to simplify production so the effort does not multiply with number of production centers. Tools are created to be flexible in handling errors and failures that happen in the system and respond accordingly, this reduces failure rates and production effort. This paper will focus on one cycle of simulation production within BaBar as a description of a large scale computing effort which was fully performed, and provided new simulation data to the users on time

Status Report of the DPHEP Study Group: Towards a Global Effort for Sustainable Data Preservation in High Energy Physics

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are mostly unique. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis was convened as a panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). The group was formed by large collider-based experiments and investigated the technical and organisational aspects of HEP data preservation. An intermediate report was released in November 2009 addressing the general issues of data preservation in HEP. This paper includes and extends the intermediate report. It provides an analysis of the research case for data preservation and a detailed description of the various projects at experiment, laboratory and international levels. In addition, the paper provides a concrete proposal for an international organisation in charge of the data management and policies in high-energy physics

Semileptonic B Decays and Determination of |Vub|

Semileptonic decays of the B mesons provide an excellent probe for the weak and strong interactions of the bottom quark. The large data samples collected at the B Factories have pushed the experimental studies of the semileptonic B decays to a new height and stimulated significant theoretical developments. I review recent progresses in this fast-evolving field, with an emphasis on the determination of the magnitude of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element |Vub|.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Mod. Phys. Lett.