Goals of the HEP Software Foundation

The HEP Software Foundation (HSF) facilitates coordination and common efforts in high energy physics (HEP) software and computing internationally.

Current HEP software is the result of well over 20 years of development, and now must evolve to meet the challenges posed by new experimental programmes. In addition, the computing landscape is evolving rapidly and we need to exploit all the expertise available in our community, and in other scientific disciplines, in order to meet the technical challenges we are facing.

The objectives of the HSF are to:

• Share expertise on software development
• Raise awareness of existing software and solutions
• Help discussions to catalyse new common projects
• Promote commonality and collaboration in new developments to make the most of limited resources
• Aid developers and users in creating, discovering, using and sustaining common software
• Support training and career development for software and computing specialists
• Help the community to set priorities and goals for development
• Facilitate wider connections; while the HSF is a HEP community effort, it is very open to collaboration with other sciences

In 2017 the HSF organised a Community White Paper initiative, which resulted in the publication of a Roadmap for HEP Computing. This document laid out the software and computing challenges that would be faced during the next decade and the roadmap of R&D that would needed to face them successfully.

In 2025 the HSF prepared an update to the CWP, The Critical Importance of Software for HEP as input for the European Particle Physics Strategy Update, which was a community effort endorsed by ALICE, ATLAS, Belle II, CMS, DUNE, ePIC, LHCb, MCnet and WLCG.

The HSF Steering Group helps to run the organisation on a day to day basis.

Please feel free to ask us any questions you have.