Automated Parallel Calculation of Collaborative Statistical Models

Large scale statistical data analysis in particle physics

Image: CMS Doomsday at the CERN LHC by solarnu – https://www.flickr.com/photos/solarnu/2078532845

Analysis of particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN requires very complex statistical models to analyze hundreds of datasets together. The goal of these models is to find evidence of new particles, for example the Higgs boson discovered in 2012, while taking into account observations in many signal and control regions. These statistical models are computationally very expensive to calculate due to their complexity. In this project a new strategy was introduced in the most commonly used statistical modeling software used at the LHC, RooFit, to parallelize the calculation of the computationally expensive parts of these models. The new calculation strategy reduces the total time for realistic complex models by almost an order of magnitude, i.e., from multiple hours for each model fit to the data to about 20 minutes, without requiring any changes to code of the statistical model itself. The new code is part of the publicly available RooFit software, distributed with the open-source ROOT data analysis environment managed CERN.

Participating organisations

Netherlands eScience Center
NIKHEF
Natural Sciences & Engineering
Natural Sciences & Engineering

Impact

Output

Team

WV
Wouter Verkerke
Principal investigator
National Institute for Subatomic Physics
Patrick Bos
eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center
Jisk Attema
Senior eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center
Rena Bakhshi
Programme Manager
Netherlands eScience Center
Inti Pelupessy
Inti Pelupessy
Senior eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center

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