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

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

Teramac–configurable custom computing

can execute synchronous logic designs of up to one million gates at rates up to l megahertz. A fully configured Teramac includes half a gigabyte of RAM and hardware support for large multiported register files. The system has been built from custom FPGA&apos;s packaged in large multichip modules (MCMs). A large custom circuit (-1,000,000 gates) may be compiled onto the hardware in approximately 2 hours, without user intervention. The system is being used to explore the potential of custom computing machinery (CCM). 1 Teramac System Overview Research on special purpose parallel architectures and custom computing is very much an experimental science dependent on the existence of prototypes. We have built an FPGA-based configurable custom computing engine to enable experiments on an interesting scale. Teramac is a configurable hardware system comprising 1728 custom FPGAs and.5 gigabytes of RAM. It features: 1,000,000 gate capacity for synchronous logic circuits. up to 1 MHz clock rate..5 Gbytes of memory organized into 64 independent, 32-bit-wide banks, each with independent read and write ports. Banks may be combined horizontally and vertically to form large memories. Fully automatic compilation. Checkpoint restart capability. Scalability. A minimum Teramac system (a single board) supports designs of up to 64K gates. Additional boards may be added to expand the capacity incrementally, up to maximum of 16 boards. We are currently conducting experiments with an 8 board Teramac system.

The Teramac custom computer: Extending the limits with defect tolerance

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