The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment is one of the two large
general-purpose particle physics detectors built at the LHC (Large Hadron
Collider) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The diverse collaboration combined
with a highly distributed computing environment and Petabytes/year of data
being collected makes CMS unlike any other High Energy Physics collaborations
before. This presents new challenges to educate and bring users, coming from
different cultural, linguistics and social backgrounds, up to speed to
contribute to the physics analysis. CMS has been able to deal with this new
paradigm by deploying a user support structure model that uses collaborative
tools to educate about software, computing an physics tools specific to CMS. To
carry out the user support mission worldwide, an LHC Physics Centre (LPC) was
created few years back at Fermilab as a hub for US physicists. The LPC serves
as a "brick and mortar" location for physics excellence for the CMS physicists
where graduate and postgraduate scientists can find experts in all aspects of
data analysis and learn via tutorials, workshops, conferences and gatherings.
Following the huge success of LPC, a centre at CERN itself called LHC Physics
Centre at CERN (LPCC) and Terascale Analysis Centre at DESY have been created
with similar goals. The CMS user support model would also facilitate in making
the non-CMS scientific community learn about CMS physics. A good example of
this is the effort by HEP experiments, including CMS, to focus on data
preservation efforts. In order to facilitate its use by the future scientific
community, who may want to re-visit our data, and re-analyze it, CMS is
evaluating the resources required. A detailed, good quality and well-maintained
documentation by the user support group about the CMS computing and software
may go a long way to help in this endeavour.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure