Description

The LHC smashes groups of protons together at close to the speed of light: 40 million times per second and with seven times the energy of the most powerful accelerators built up to now. Many of these will just be glancing blows but some will be head on collisions and very energetic. When this happens some of the energy of the collision is turned into mass and previously unobserved, short-lived particles – which could give clues about how Nature behaves at a fundamental level - fly out and into the detector. Our work includes the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson, which leads to the award of a Nobel prize for the underlying theory that predicted the Higgs boson as an important piece of the standard model theory of particle physics.

CMS is a particle detector that is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy collisions in the LHC. Like a cylindrical onion, different layers of detectors measure the different particles, and use this key data to build up a picture of events at the heart of the collision. The CMSSW is a collection of software for the CMS experiment. It is responsible for the collection and processing of information about the particle collisions at the detector. CMSSW uses the ROOT framework to provide support for data storage and processing. ROOT relies on Cling, Clang, LLVM for building automatically efficient I/O representation of the necessary C++ objects. The I/O properties of each object is described in a compilable C++ file called a /dictionary/. ROOT’s I/O dictionary system relies on C++ modules to improve the overall memory footprint when being used.

One source of performance loss is the need for symbol lookups across the very large set of CMSSW modules. ROOT needs to be improved to optimize this lookup so that it does not pull all modules defining namespace edm on edm::X lookups.

Task ideas

The project consists of the following tasks:

• Develop an extension to the GlobalModuleIndex infrastructure in clang which keeps track of the DeclKind of the identifiers so that we can later ignore the identifiers that declare a namespace.
• Track down the test failures of CMSSW and check if the proposed implementation works.
• Develop tutorials and documentation.
• Present the work at the relevant meetings and conferences.

Technology

C/C++, Clang, LLVM, ROOT

Desirable Skills

• Necessary knowledge: C++ programming; data structures and algorithms.
• Basic knowledge of Clang and LLVM
• Experience with ROOT would be an asset.

Expected results

Develop functionality in Clang’s GlobalModuleIndex facility and ROOT’s TClingCallbacks which can store a mapping between a identifier and clang::DeclKind.

Candidate Guidelines and Evaluation

If you have interest in working on the project there is a list of things to do in order to maximize your chances to get selected:

1. Contact the mentors and express interest in the project. Make sure you attach your CV;
2. Download the source code of the project, build it and run the demos;
3. Start familiarizing yourself with the codebase;
4. If you have questions you can always contact a mentor.

For an evaluation task please contact the mentors.

Mentors

• Alexander Penev (University of Plovdiv Paisii Hilendarski)
• Vassil Vassilev (Princeton)
• David Lange (Princeton)

Links

ROOT CMSSW Compiler-Research clad llvm clang

Additional Information

• Difficulty level (low / medium / high): high
• Duration: 350 hours
• Mentor availability: May-September

Corresponding Project

• Compiler-Research

Participating Organizations

• princeton

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