Community White Paper (CWP)

This page gives more detail about the process that gave rise to the HSF’s Community White Paper Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s.

It is kept for historical interest and to preserve intermediate documents about exercise.


A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s

Realizing the physics programs of the planned and/or upgraded HEP experiments over the next 10 years requires the HEP community to address a number of challenges in the area of software and computing. It is expected that the computing models will need to evolve and a significant “software upgrade” is required. In order to identify and prioritize the software research and development investments required, we embarked on a community planning process. The aim was to produce a Community White Paper (CWP) which would describe the community strategy and a roadmap for software and computing R&D in HEP for the 2020s. This activity was organised under the umbrella of the HSF. The LHC experiments and HSF were specifically charged by the WLCG project and reached out to other HEP experiments around the world to participate.

Final Roadmap Paper

The final version of the CWP Roadmap was submitted to arXiv on 15 December 2017. It was accepted on 18 December.

The roadmap can still be endorsed by the community and minor updates will be done to expand the author list and or to correct any errors found. Please contact the CWP Ghost Writers. We very much encourage you to do this, to show the breadth of the community’s support for the roadmap.

The second draft of the CWP, the Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s report (also available as a pdf) was released to the community on November 17.

The first draft was released on October 20, it is still available as a Google Docs or as a PDF.

Editorial Team

The Editorial Board, which helped to prepare the final version of the roadmap, was:

Working Groups

The list of CWP working groups, their charges and working documents was maintained on a dedicated working group page.

Main CWP Events

The following series of workshops or events related to the CWP took place:

CWP Process

The CWP process involved a number of workshops between January and Summer 2017. As part of the process members of the community were encouraged to write white papers to describe their ideas on the various topics. White papers could be submitted by anyone: individuals, groups of individuals, experiments, institutions, etc.

There is a list of the contributed CWP whitepapers.

Some guidance and suggestions for WGs was originally given here: Guidance for WGs at HSF workshop at SDSC