HEP Legacy Data Project
The issue of research data preservation is under discussion around the world. In High Energy Physics (HEP) this has recently become an important topic as a number of experimental projects have stopped recording collision data and there is a desire to ensure that the data is useable for many years. Although the HEP community are pioneers in scholarly communication, the community has taken yet few steps to enable re-use of its data. A solution will likely involve a variety of technological tools such as virtualization, grid and cloud computing.
The HEP Research Computing Group at the University of Victoria has been funded by CANARIE through its Network Enabled Platform (NEP) Program to build an environment for the analysis of legacy HEP data with particular emphasis on the BaBar experiment.
The aim is to build a distributed cloud where HEP users can build their application in a virtual machine (VM) and submit batch jobs to a Cloud Scheduler . The cloud scheduler would request VM's on the cloud. Once the VM"s are active, then the user batch jobs would be dispatched. The CANFAR Project is also making use of the cloud scheduler being developed by our group.
