Collaborating at a Distance Lucas Taylor, Northeastern University, Boston

Distributed Collaborations LHC collaborations are global enterprises Teams are distributed globally at all levels Detector builders Software developers Computing operators Physics analysis Management, funding Work in complex matrix organizations CERN users by nation of institute (5 Feb 2008) E.g. ATLAS experiment 37 countries 169 institutions 2500 scientific authors

Distributed Collaboration Needs Distributed people need access to distributed information Web … invented at CERN Distributed people need access to distributed data & CPUs Grid … developed with CERN Distributed people need access to other distributed people Communications systems

Communications Systems Wide range of usual systems Text: Email (too much), SMS (not much), instant messaging, news and discussion groups Voice: phone, mobile, some VoIP, phone-conferencing Video-conferencing: in-house (“EVO”), commercial (H.323) Some coherence from CERN’s meeting management system Give users a coherent view of many systems (e.g. “EVO”) Number of meetings per year (as of Sept 2008)

E.g. “EVO” video-conferencing Desktops 18,900 registered users 600 users per day 160 meetings per day H.323 MCU Phones EVO SIP Handheld OpenGL Video Monitoring / MonALISA Whiteboard / Shared Files Record / Playback IM / Chat Lucas Taylor 5

Collaborative Working Tools Web is ubiquitous in the daily tools Controls, workflow management, monitoring … Finance, HR, admin Document servers Wikis, e-learning ... Software development Task / bug tracker Computing operations Services monitoring Operations centres Shift operations Physics data quality

Distributed Control Centres Connecting local and remote communities CMS Experiment Control Room Remote Operations Centre at Fermilab Permanently running video links to operations centres CMS Centre at CERN: monitoring, computing operations, analysis … also DESY (Hamburg), Dubna (Russia), Pisa, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro … others

Distributed Collaboration It works - the Web is central to everything Particle physics community innovates as required to meet their needs Web, Grid, …? ..and uses numerous commodity systems Distributed Collaboration is crucial to the success of Particle Physics Especially in the coming physics analysis phase … next talk …

Collaborating at a Distance Thank you ! Collaborating at a Distance