The HEP Software Foundation
Advancing high energy physics community software
HSF Coordination Meeting #309, 18 June 2026
Attending
Present/Contributing: Caterina Doglioni, Ruslan Mashinistov, Claire Antel, Joshua Isaacson, Eduardo Rodrigues, Saptaparna Battacharya, Michel Hernandez Villanueva, Peter Fackeldey
Apologies/Contributing: Graeme Stewart, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Christian Wessel, Maarten van Veghel, Alexander Moreno, Stefan Roiser
News, general matters, announcements
INFRA-DEV/TECH season of proposals just concluded
Two proposals relevant for HSF:
- PSENTRIC (HORIZON-INFRA-2026-DEV-01-02), follow-up of ESCAPE (https://projectescape.eu/) and including a broader astronomy community and analytical physics facilities (Caterina Doglioni and Graeme Stewart as contacts)
- OSCARS2 (HORIZON-INFRA-2026-01-EOSC-01), follow up of OSCARS (https://oscars-project.eu/science-clusters) with HSF involvement for training and affiliated project guidelines (Stefan Roiser and Caterina Doglioni as contacts)
One letter of support for HORIZON-INFRA-2026-TECH-01-01 circulated on HSF Forum mailing list last week.
Steering Group & Advisory Group
WLCG/HSF workshop
- Co-organising the next WLCG/HSF Workshop, 2-6 November 2026 in Bologna: Converged on draft schedule of HSF parallel sessions.
- Anticipate a call for contributions!
- We are still (for a bit) looking for conveners for the HSF parallel sessions. Please get in touch (very soon) with the SG if you’re interested.
Plan for the near future:
- online agenda version by the end of the month
- finalising the conveners - we will send specific invitations, open a call for abstracts as well at the beginning of July
- coordination with WLCG on environmental sustainability needed (Caterina/Eduardo will follow up).
Advisory group
The ePIC collaboration is now part of the advisory group.
HSF Affiliated Projects and Software
Status at https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/projects/projects.html - 6 projects affiliated.
Reviews in progress, being finalised:
- NoPayloadDB Conditions Database
Status: reviewers busy, but no other showstoppers identified so far.
Other potential projects:
- ACTS: Caterina will email the SG to find out who is already in contact
- Herwig (we already have Madgraph/Pythia) - we will hear from Christian Gutschow and James Whitehead (MCNet reps).
- Phoenix - the author is happy to join, the SG will look for reviewers
- Rivet - Caterina will follow up with authors next week
SG will find volunteers to contact these projects from GSoC list of projects this year:
- Clad
- Omnifold (Saptaparna will contact authors)
- PODIO (future collider frameworks - Michel will contact authors)
Do not hesitate to discuss around you to identify relevant projects/libraries that could engage with the affiliation programme. AA conveners are in an excellent position to help us identify which projects to prioritise to join the affiliation programme.
AI in contributions to HSF repositories
Feedback still welcome: So far HSF repositories do not provide any statement on AI-powered/-helped contributions, and we are starting to get some. On occasions we can be flooded by not-to-useful contributions.
This year an “AI statement” is strongly suggested in GSoC proposals. We should do something similar.
There is an ongoing discussion at https://github.com/HSF/hsf.github.io/issues/1919.
Q: Should we think of a code of conduct/guidelines?
Suggestion to update the website how-to with a statement on AI and how we will be dealing with “spam”.
Following the LHCC recommendation (from previous minutes):
[The LHCC] Encourages the HSF to continue the open discussion around AI and AI-assisted technologies and to develop a policy framework for their application within HEP software. Additionally, it recommends that the HSF assumes a leading role in the coordination of training initiatives focused on these new technologies.
Decision taken to start a public discussion towards (1) loose guidelines on AI-assisted coding in common software (2) common training that collaborations can build on.
Plan, to be taken on by Claire, Michel, Caterina:
- have an HSF meeting on July 29th, 15:30-17:30
- send a “save the date” co-organise the meeting with anyone else interested in the topic, namely EuCAIF Fair & Sustainable WG, Interexperiment ML working group at CERN, EVERSE project and RSQKit, “Towards a National-Scale AI Collaboration in HEP” US blueprint workshop.
- discuss the plan for the meeting with the SG via e-mail the week of 22.06 before sending the announcement
Points and links raised during the discussion in the coordination meeting:
- Michel: Belle2 would be interested in the HSF being the contact point for responsible use of AI.
- Claire: “using LLM” tutorials in ATLAS don’t feature responsible use of AI, but there are slides from IRIS-HEP
- Michel: training events in BNL asked for best practices in use of AI, and we put some slides together based on experiences: AI-assisted code, Remarks & discussion on best practices
- Caterina: the research software community has been thinking about this, see e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20321134. There are also CERN guidelines https://home.cern/general-principles-use-ai-cern/
HSF Seminar Series and Compute Accelerator Forum
Planned HSF seminars:
- 24th June (next week): Seminar on Software Packaging - organised by Software Tools & Packaging AA.
- Cool agenda hosting multiple speakers.
- 22nd July: Seminar on “Green Software Engineering” by Michael Sparks, Manchester.
- Note: Exceptionally not last Wednesday of the month.
- 30th Sept: Seminar on “assessing sustainability of AI” by Sophia Wilson (SAINTS Lab, University of Copenhagen).
(Thanks to the activity groups for coming to us with seminar ideas and speakers!) HSF seminar conveners are reachable at hsf-seminar-conveners@googlegroups.com. Please send your suggestions for next seminars.
Activities Updates
GSoC 2026
Projects have started, progressing.
Software Training
- Past Events
- HSF Software basics @ BNL and Fermilab, targeting summer students who have little experience and join every year. Supported by management, very well attended (120 students, good reception).
- Next Events
- Next HEP C++ course 12-16 October (advanced edition), https://indico.cern.ch/event/1689553/ , registration to open before summer
Physics Generators
From last meeting: Pursue idea of “sustainability reports” by generator groups. Pythia would volunteer to give the first such report. This will be followed up by the generators conveners and Caterina.
PyHEP
- PyHEP.dev 2026 will be held at Nikhef Amsterdam, September 7-9.
- [PyHEP.dev 2026] Indico almost ready (registration page is there now; only missing: local recommendations). Announcement currently being drafted.
- Sep 8 2026 (during PyHEP.dev): Special 2h seminar talk by us at Nikhef about PyHEP activities
JuliaHEP
- JuliaHEP 2026 will be held at MPI Munich, October 19-23. Abstract submission and registration are already open!
- JuliaCon 2026 - JuliaHEP Mini-Symposium - Julia for Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics: From Precision Science to High-Performance Tools. Scheduled for the Wednesday Morning (Aug 12).
AOB
Do not hesitate to get in touch with the SG if you have/know of events useful to add to the HSF calendar. The calendar is used by very many to check for available dates, constraints, and plan events. Thank you in advance.
HSF Promotional Poster
Sapta has a poster to promote the HSF. There is one version here, but please contact her for the latest version.
Physical Constants / HEPdata Library
There is now an early “proof of concept” version: hep-constants. Some generally positive feedback was received, but no further development yet.
Next Meeting
The next coordination meeting will be on July 2nd.