SYSTEMS
Team simulates events to be produced by collider using NCSA and TeraGrid systems
A team of physicists at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at San Diego is on the hunt for the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle thought to be responsible for mass. When CERN's Large Hadron Collider comes online in late 2007, they hope to use the collider's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) to detect the boson as it decays into two photons. They also hope to capture more rare "weak boson fusion" decays in which the two photons are accompanied by a pair of high-energy jets. 
Over the last year, the team used more than one million CPU hours on TeraGrid systems to simulate these events, as well as the other events that will be produced by the collider's proton-proton collisions. This will allow them to optimize the process by which the signals generated by Higgs decay are separated from the potentially overwhelming background noise. In response to their findings, a new, optimized signal-selection process was developed. It distinguishes signal events from all sources of background with significantly improved accuracy, which will help ensure that Higgs bosons are discovered as quickly as possible after the collider is activated. The results were crucial to the completion of the 2006 CMS Physics Technical Design Report, which describes the various analysis channels and detector capabilities of the experiment and defines the research priorities for the detector's first five years of operation. The team worked with the NCSA to establish a dedicated queue on 256 nodes of one of its TeraGrid systems three times in 2006. These dedicated allocations were important to the preparation of the technical design report with its very strict deadlines.
Over the last year, the team used more than one million CPU hours on TeraGrid systems to simulate these events, as well as the other events that will be produced by the collider's proton-proton collisions. This will allow them to optimize the process by which the signals generated by Higgs decay are separated from the potentially overwhelming background noise. In response to their findings, a new, optimized signal-selection process was developed. It distinguishes signal events from all sources of background with significantly improved accuracy, which will help ensure that Higgs bosons are discovered as quickly as possible after the collider is activated. The results were crucial to the completion of the 2006 CMS Physics Technical Design Report, which describes the various analysis channels and detector capabilities of the experiment and defines the research priorities for the detector's first five years of operation. The team worked with the NCSA to establish a dedicated queue on 256 nodes of one of its TeraGrid systems three times in 2006. These dedicated allocations were important to the preparation of the technical design report with its very strict deadlines.