Emerging Computing Technologies in High Energy Physics

Abstract

While in the early 90s High Energy Physics (HEP) lead the computing industry by establishing the HTTP protocol and the first web-servers, the long time-scale for planning and building modern HEP experiments has resulted in a generally slow adoption of emerging computing technologies which rapidly become commonplace in business and other scientific fields. I will overview some of the fundamental computing problems in HEP computing and then present the current state and future potential of employing new computing technologies in addressing these problems.

Technical Note: Radiotherapy dose calculations using GEANT4 and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

“…Significant computational overhead prevents the routine use of these Monte Carlo techniques in the clinical setting, however the advent of cloud computing provides a low cost and easy to maintain alternative to the set-up of dedicated compute hardware 8 , something that may be of particular benefit to clinics in rural and regional areas and developing countries. Indeed, several authors have explored the usefulness of the cloud for Monte Carlo simulation [9][10][11] , the most notable of which uses Fluka for proton beam dose calculations on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon Web Services LLC, USA) 8 .…”