Have a safe day!
Wednesday, June 13
9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Users' Annual Meeting - Auditorium
THERE WILL BE NO DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK TODAY
THERE WILL BE NO COLLOQUIUM THIS WEEK
Thursday, June 14
2 p.m.
Computing Techniques Seminar - FCC1W
Speaker: Rob Johnson, Cloudera
Title: HBASE
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK -
2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar (NOTE LOCATION) - Curia II
Speaker: David Whittum, Varian Medical Systems
Title: Opportunities Beyond the State of the Art in Electron Accelerator Systems
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
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Wednesday, June 13
- Breakfast: English muffin sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Beef barley soup
- Gyros
- Baked seafood au gratin
- Baked linguine and cheese
- Beef and cheddar panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Grilled chicken bowtie w/ tomato cream
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu |
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Wednesday, June 13
Lunch
- Salad Niçoise
- Sponge cake w/ raspberry sauce
Friday, June 15
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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45th annual Users' Meeting continues today
The Fermilab Users' Meeting continues today with lectures in Ramsey Auditorium. Today's presentations include talks on neutrino and muon experiments and on dark matter and dark energy scientific programs. Fermilab Director Pier Oddone and the Director of the DOE's Office of High Energy Physics Jim Siegrist will also give presentations.
Recipients of the URA Tollestrup Award and the URA Thesis Award will also be honored.
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At New Perspectives, graduate students show off their work
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Graduate students have produced many of the scientific posters on display this week in the Wilson Hall atrium.
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The 2012 New Perspectives Conference will take place all day on Thursday, June 14, starting at 8 a.m. in Ramsey Auditorium. According to Graduate Student Association officer Brian Tice, 32 graduate students and postdocs submitted abstracts, a new record for the meeting. Of the 32, thirty graduate students and postdocs will present, up from 28 last year, which had set a previous record.
For many of the presenters, this will be their first time presenting research before a large audience.
"New Perspectives is a protected zone for graduate students to show their work," Tice said. "It's a way for graduate students to get their feet wet."
Each talk will be 12 minutes long, with three minutes for questions from the audience, generally composed of other graduate students and postdocs. In addition to first-time presenters, graduate students and postdocs who were unable to attend major conferences will present their data here.
"It's a more relaxed environment, with less pressure on the students," Tice said.
E-mail gsa_officers@fnal.gov for more information on the Graduate Student Association or New Perspectives.
—Joseph Piergrossi
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Fermilab Users' Meeting:
then and now
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Fermilab's first director, Robert Wilson, gives a chalkboard talk at the 1970 Users' Meeting. Photo courtesy of Fermilab Archives |
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Fermilab scientist Michael Kirby gives a slide presentation on the search for the Higgs at the Tevatron at this year's Users' Meeting. Photo: Cindy Arnold |
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University of Maryland
NAME:
University of Maryland
HOME TOWN:
College Park, Maryland
MASCOT:
Testudo
SCHOOL COLORS:
Red, white, black and gold
PARTICLE PHYSICS COLLABORATIONS:
CMS, LBNE, SeaQuest. Also participates in Babar at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
NUMBER OF SCIENTISTS AND STUDENTS AT FERMILAB:
Six faculty, four postdocs and four graduate students
COLLABORATING AT FERMILAB SINCE:
Early 1970s
PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH FOCUS:
The University of Maryland experimental high-energy physics group investigates a wide range of particle physics topics: top, B and neutrino physics and searches for new particles. The theory group investigates
physics beyond the Standard Model, fields and strings, CPT symmetry, neutrino physics and studies of dark matter.
WHAT SETS PARTICLE PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND APART?
Both the experiment and theory groups at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University collaborate on the physics of the LHC. We also work with our colleagues in nuclear chemistry at Maryland, who are members of CMS experiment concentrating on heavy-ion physics. We include undergraduates in our research.
FUNDING AGENCIES:
DOE, NSF
View all university profiles.
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Symposium looks back at Tevatron’s life at Fermilab
From the Daily Herald, June 12, 2012
At a symposium Monday reviewing the impact of the now-shuttered Tevatron particle accelerator, Fermilab director Pier Oddone discussed what’s next for the laboratory.
While rattling off experiments — both under way and proposed — to explore the energy, intensity and cosmic frontiers, he also mentioned Fermilab is refiguring the proposed Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment so it stands a chance of receiving U.S. Department of Energy approval and funding.
A working group organized by Oddone will propose, in a report to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, that the DOE build a long beam line to shoot neutrinos to a detector in the former Homestake gold mine in Lead, S.D., and a 10-ton detector in that mine, in the first of three phases of constructing the experiment, he said.
Read more |
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From serial to parallel
Rob Roser, head of the Scientific Computing Division, wrote this column.
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Rob Roser
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The computing landscape continues to change as technologies improve. As a graduate student, I ran my physics analysis jobs on a DEC VAX and thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. As things evolved, I learned how to run jobs on farms of commodity PCs, which offered even more advantages. Now, experimenters use the Grid to run jobs on machines anywhere in the world.
Technology does not stand still. Modern-day computers now have upwards of 32 processors on a single chip and that trend will continue. The gaming industry has developed graphics processing units, or GPUs, that were originally designed to rapidly manipulate graphical images. Modern GPUs do this very efficiently. Their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms where processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel. This technology has great potential for the high-energy physics community.
As technologies evolve, our software architects adapt in order to take advantage of the changes. The trouble is that many of the existing software tools of high-energy physics were not designed to work in this new computing environment. One of the most important tools of our community is GEANT4 (for GEometry ANd Tracking). GEANT4 is a platform for the simulation of the passage of particles through matter using Monte Carlo methods. In its current incarnation, the program is not well suited to these highly parallelized computing systems.
At a recent workshop in DC, computing experts met to strategize about how one could modify GEANT to operate it on these highly parallelized platforms of the future. The workshop was jointly sponsored by DOE’s HEP and ASCR, the Office for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. Together, these two groups are developing a unified plan that, if successfully funded, will take this software to the next level of performance.
Fermilab is taking a leading role in the evolution of these scientific computing tools for the next generation of hardware. Members of our Scientific Computing Division, led by Daniel Elvira, will continue to advance GEANT. Success of this project will mean not only faster simulation time but also enable the architects to add the next level of sophistication to this important physics tool.
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SSVSP update
Fermilab has entered the final stage of the self-select voluntary separation program. Laboratory management was able to accept 27 of the total of 32 individuals who applied and did not rescind their application. Accepted individuals will separate from the laboratory between June 26 and July 13. Fermilab management and DOE will now discuss the next necessary steps in the workforce reduction process.
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Power outage - June 15
On Friday, June 15, from 7 to 7:30 a.m. there will be a site-wide power outage to turn off power from the master substation and backfeed it from the Kautz Road substation. Users across the site will notice a disruption of power and networking, including wireless, during the outage. Exceptions are the Feynman Computing Center, the Wilson Hall 8 Fiber Center Communications Room (WH8-FC), the Wilson Hall 5NW server room and the Grid Computing Center (GCC).
In addition, the Lattice Computing Center in the NML building will have an extended outage on the same day, Friday, June 15. Maintenance for all LCC computing facilities is scheduled from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. During this time all computing and networking in the LCC computer rooms will be unavailable.
Please turn off your computers and small electrical devices in your offices before you leave work on Thursday afternoon to avoid power disruptions on Friday morning.
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ES&H weekly report, June 12
This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, contains no incidents.
Find the full report here. |
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Mostly sunny
