The international GridKa School is one of the leading summer schools for advanced computing techniques. The school’s aims is to bring participants in contact with experts from science and technology leaders in on-hand tutorials and talks sharing their vast experiences and knowledge. The targetvaudience are different groups like grid and cloud beginners, advanced users as well as administrators, graduate and PhD students. Organized by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), GridKa School is hosted by Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC).
This year GridKa School covers a broad range of topics. With virtualization becoming more and more in many aspects of the information technologies, one range of subjects are lightweight containers as well as virtualization of networks, file systems or whole data center infrastructures [ELK, Cloud HPC, IPv6, LXC/Docker, Puppet, SDN/OpenDaylight, SDDC]. For an efficient use of resources another focus is on efficient programming techniques and parallel programming on modern CPUs and GPUs [Concurrent C++, CUDA, FastFlow, Programming Templates, AngularJS]. On large scale data analysis, GridKa School offers this year contributions on various database architectures, analysis frameworks and analysis tools [CEPH, MongoDB, (no)SQL DBs, Python/Pandas, R, Spark/Hadoop]. To teach not only theoretical but also practical experiences, experienced professionals cover topics in plenary talks as well as in on-hands tutorials.
Aiming to bring beginners and experienced data analysts and admins together, GridKa has special fees for students and members of academia.
The International Cosmic Day enables students to get in contact with astroparticle physicists to get a first insight into their research, experimental methods and everyday work.
Some basic questions which will be adressed are: What are cosmic particles? Where do they come from? How can they be measured?
The relatively young research field of astroparticle physics has been developing dynamically over the last years (some experiments are: ANTARES, Auger, BAIKAL, Fermi, HAWC, H.E.S.S., IceCube, MAGIC, Telescope Array, VERITAS ). It connects particle physics (describing the interactions of elementary particles) with astrophysics (describing up to the biggest structures in the universe) and with cosmology (studying the history of the universe). One of the very interesting topics in astroparticle physics is trying to understand the acceleration mechanisms of cosmic ray particles to very high energies, much higher than accelerators on Earth can reach.
The universe is a big place. Cosmic rays drift around and get energy boosts from multiple sources. Some particles attain enormous energies. When they strike the upper atmosphere, they initiate Extended Air Showers. These events create thousands of particles that simultaneously reach a small section of Earth’s surface. More energetic primaries affect larger sections of the surface.
On the International Cosmic Day we will focus on two questions which will be addressed by student experiments:
Coincident air shower measurements: Can you find out how often nearby detectors simultaneously “light up” with cosmic rays? If they do, is it a randomness or a measurement of one of these showers?
Zenith angle distribution of air shower particles: Can you find out if the number of air shower particles arriving from the horizon is the same as from above? If it is not, what could cause this effect?
The 4th International Cosmic Day on November 5, 2015 is organized by DESY, together with Netzwerk Teilchenwelt, IPPOG, QuarkNet and Fermilab and will enable students in many different countries around the world to get to do their own experiments at nearby universities, research institutions or even in their classrooms.
We invite students to:
Perform their own cosmic particle experiment
Analyze and present their data on a common website
Compare their own results with the results of others
Work like in an international research collaboration
The Workshop runs over one year, including two meetings in Les Houches in the month of June, and exchanges and collaborations before and after the meetings. The meetings in Les Houches will consist of two sessions:
Session I: 1-10 June 2015 with emphasis on SM-related issues
Session II: 10-19 June 2015 with emphasis on New-Physics searches
ISAPP School on Cosmology. June 15-25, 2015, Paris, France
Every year, the ISAPP European network* organises schools in astroparticle physics at the doctoral level for experimentalists, observers and theorists. The present school will be held in Paris, 15- 25 June 2015, and is dedicated to Cosmology. Time is ripe for an in-depth look at the field in light of the new results from the Planck satellite mission and the beginning of an era of large surveys dedicated to dark energy research. No prior experience in cosmology is required as introductory courses will present the standard cosmological model and observational techniques. Topics to be covered include the cosmic microwave background, the early universe, large-scale structure, dark energy observations and theory, modified gravity, instrumental techniques. It will finish with a look to future prospects in major research areas.
The School is open to PhD students and post-docs working in the fields of cosmology, high energy astrophysics and particle physics. Lectures will take place close to the APC laboratory in Paris. Pre-registration will be open from March 5th to April 26th. Please send a CV and have your adviser send an email in support of your application. For more details, please consult the School’s website.
ISAPP is a network of 33 European doctorate schools and institutes from nine European Union countries plus Russia and Israel. ISAPP’s main goal is to create a real astroparticle community amalgamating the elementary particle and astrophysics communities. To this purpose exchanges between students and lecturers are promoted as far as common doctorate theses; in addition every year two to three events are organized, normally two schools and sometimes also a summer institute. More information can be found on the ISAPP web site.
2nd International Meeting on Large Neutrino Infrastructures
Press Release
Date Issued: April 30, 2015
The agency(1) representatives and laboratory directors(2) gathered at the 2nd International Meeting on Large Neutrino Infrastructures(3) hosted at Fermilab on 20-21 April 2015, reiterated their firm belief that neutrino physics is a worldwide research priority in fundamental physics.
As was stated by the Nobel Prize winner Carlo Rubbia at the meeting: “The neutrino together with the Higgs, are so far the only elementary particles whose basic properties are still largely unknown”. The complexity of the questions concerning the nature of the neutrino and its impact on the knowledge and understanding of our universe, demands a coherent programme, ranging from large infrastructure deployment to small scale projects. This complexity continues to be a constant source of innovation in accelerator, particle detection and underground technologies, with significant societal applications. Furthermore, the parallel increase in precision of the terrestrial neutrino program and of cosmological surveys, measuring the impact of neutrinos in cosmic structure formation, is a major avenue to probe new physics beyond the Standard Models of Fundamental Interactions and/or Cosmology.
During the first meeting of last year the agencies had invited the neutrino scientific community to develop urgently a coherent international programme in the long-baseline oscillation accelerator field, consistent with the recommendations of the European Strategy for Particle Physics and the HEPAP/P5(4) report. In the second meeting, organized by Fermilab and APPEC(5) , the agency representatives were impressed by the rapidity, quality of convergence and momentum of the efforts of the community working on liquid argon Time Protection Chambers (LAr TPCs), to develop a credible scientific program based on:
an ambitious large infrastructure effort, consisting of a long-baseline beam and detector project (LBNF/DUNE(6)) hosted at Fermilab and SURF(7), based on previous design studies, but largely upgrading them, proposed by an international collaboration, very rapidly setting up its governance structure and preparing answers to an aggressive schedule of DOE critical design reviews in July and November 2015;
a medium-scale programme of short-baseline oscillation experiments at Fermilab (Short-Baseline Near Detector, MicroBoone(8) and ICARUS(9)) aiming to test the sterile neutrino hypothesis with unprecedented accuracy;
a rich R&D and prototyping programme in the CERN North Area, related to the above programme along with other long-baseline efforts in the world (e.g. Hyper-Kamiokande(10)).
The agencies and national laboratory directors welcomed the proposed measures to complement the establishment of the international collaboration for LBNF/DUNE with appropriate agency oversight bodies: the Long-baseline Neutrino Committee (LBNC), the Resource Review Board (RRB) and an International Advisory Committee (IAC).
In addition they appreciated the progress towards the realization of the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment. An international proto-collaboration encompassing the cosmic ray and particle physics communities has been formed with large international participation and largely complementary to the LBNF/DUNE US-based program. A Memorandum of Understanding between IPNS/KEK and ICRR, University of Tokyo regarding cooperation in promoting Hyper-Kamiokande was recently signed. The Hyper-Kamiokande detector design, based on the well-established water Cherenkov detection technique, is being optimized by the international collaboration and a design report will be prepared in 2015 in view of the next immediate milestone of an international review under IPNS/ICRR.
The agencies noted the complementarity of the large detectors using different detection techniques (water, liquid argon, and liquid scintillator) in the program of neutrino parameter measurements but also, and above all, in the domain of proton decay and neutrino astrophysics. Furthermore, the complexity of the neutrino sector is such that the larger programmes need to be complemented by small and medium scale programs. The overall coherence between these programmes will guarantee an understanding of whether the Standard Model with three neutrino flavours is the one realised in Nature or, conversely, establish a ground-breaking discovery. In this context, one should consider the importance of the reactor and source neutrino experiments attempting to clarify the “reactor anomaly”, possibly due to sterile neutrinos, or the proposed measurements of the neutrino mass hierarchy by atmospheric (PINGU(11), ORCA(12), INO(13)) and reactor neutrinos (JUNO(14),RENO-50(15)). The agencies also took note of the good progress in the evaluation of systematics affecting the measurements of the neutrino mass-hierarchy by PINGU and ORCA and encouraged their further coordination actions.
Finally, there is a rich and diverse physics program in the development of single beta and neutrino-less double beta decay experiments exploring the degenerate neutrino mass region till the end of this decade. The ambitious goal for neutrino-less double-beta decay in the next decade will be the coverage in sensitivity of the inverted mass-hierarchy region. Achieving this goal will require ton-scale detectors and may require large-scale enrichment of isotopes, boosting the scale of the infrastructures and, hence, demanding large international collaborations for their construction. This coordination would involve an effort similar to the one performed for the long-baseline program, but still requires the continuation of the current measurements and R&D work for the next two or three years. It further implies the coordination with agencies not currently present at the 2nd International Neutrino Meeting. In view of the above, the agencies will deploy the necessary efforts so that all major stakeholders coordinate in the next years in the effort to identify the most promising technologies for ton-scale detector(s) whose construction could start towards the end of this decade.
The agencies and the laboratory directors thanked the Neutrino ICFA panel(16) as well as the IUPAP working group of APPIC(17) for accompanying the process and providing key advice and insight on the program.
The 3rd International Neutrino Meeting on Large Neutrino Infrastructures, to review progress towards these aims, will take place in Japan in early 2016 at a venue to be decided later this year.
