Resource-aware Research on Universe and Matter: Call-to-Action in Digital Transformation

Given the urgency to reduce fossil fuel energy production to make climate tipping points less likely, we call for resource-aware knowledge gain in the research areas on Universe and Matter with emphasis on the digital transformation. A portfolio of measures is described in detail and then summarized according to the timescales required for their implementation. The measures will both contribute to sustainable research and accelerate scientific progress through increased awareness of resource usage. This work is based on a three-days workshop on sustainability in digital transformation held in May 2023.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, publication following workshop 'Sustainability in the Digital Transformation of Basic Research on Universe & Matter', 30 May to 2 June 2023, Meinerzhagen, Germany, https://indico.desy.de/event/3748

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

HNSciCloud - Overview and technical challenges

HEP is only one of many sciences with sharply increasing compute requirements that cannot be met by profiting from Moore’s law alone. Commercial clouds potentially allow for realising larger economies of scale. While some small-scale experience requiring dedicated effort has been collected, public cloud resources have not been integrated yet with the standard workflows of science organisations in their private data centres; in addition, European science has not ramped up to significant scale yet. The HELIX NEBULA Science Cloud project - HNSciCloud, partly funded by the European Commission, addresses these points. Ten organisations under CERN’s leadership, covering particle physics, bioinformatics, photon science and other sciences, have joined to procure public cloud resources as well as dedicated development efforts towards this integration. The HNSciCloud project faces the challenge to accelerate developments performed by the selected commercial providers. In order to guarantee cost efficient usage of IaaS resources across a wide range of scientific communities, the technical requirements had to be carefully constructed. With respect to current IaaS offerings, dataintensive science is the biggest challenge; other points that need to be addressed concern identity federations, network connectivity and how to match business practices of large IaaS providers with those of public research organisations. In the first section, this paper will give an overview of the project and explain the findings so far. The last section will explain the key points of the technical requirements and present first results of the experience of the procurers with the services in comparison to their’on-premise’ infrastructure