Conveners
Track 6 - Software environment and maintainability: Performance and Heterogeneous Computing
- Ruslan Mashinistov (Brookhaven National Laboratory (US))
- Arantza De Oyanguren Campos (Univ. of Valencia and CSIC (ES))
Track 6 - Software environment and maintainability: Testing, QA, and Validation
- Arantza De Oyanguren Campos (Univ. of Valencia and CSIC (ES))
- Ruslan Mashinistov (Brookhaven National Laboratory (US))
Track 6 - Software environment and maintainability: Software Systems, Frameworks, and Integration
- Gaia Grosso (IAIFI, MIT)
- Arantza De Oyanguren Campos (Univ. of Valencia and CSIC (ES))
Track 6 - Software environment and maintainability: Programming Models and Software Design
- Ruslan Mashinistov (Brookhaven National Laboratory (US))
- Gaia Grosso (IAIFI, MIT)
Track 6 - Software environment and maintainability: Ecosystems, Collaboration, and Workflows
- Gaia Grosso (IAIFI, MIT)
- Arantza De Oyanguren Campos (Univ. of Valencia and CSIC (ES))
Track 6 - Software environment and maintainability: AI for Software and Operations
- Ruslan Mashinistov (Brookhaven National Laboratory (US))
- Gaia Grosso (IAIFI, MIT)
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Gabriele Cimador (CERN, Universitร and INFN Torino)25/05/2026, 13:45Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The ALICE GPU TPC reconstruction is implemented by many GPU functions (kernels). Each kernel requires a block and a grid size to control GPU thread spawning, and may also need additional parameters like memory buffer sizes or pre-processing flags. Moreover, ALICE undertakes an aggressive GPU optimization by mapping grid and block sizes to launch bounds, optional compiler hints affecting...
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Dr Andrea Bocci (CERN)25/05/2026, 14:03Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The rapid evolution of computing architectures toward increasing heterogeneity โ combining multi-core CPUs with accelerators from multiple vendors โ poses major challenges for performance, portability, and long-term sustainability of high-energy physics (HEP) software. Maintaining separate implementations for each architecture is costly, error-prone, and difficult to scale as both hardware and...
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Sylvain Caillou (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR))25/05/2026, 14:21Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
In recent years, numerous Machine Learningโbased algorithms have been developed within particle physics experiments to accelerate the reconstruction of complex detector objects, notably at CERN in the context of the HL-LHC and, for example, within the Belle II experiment. A significant fraction of these approaches relies on Deep Geometric Learning, and in particular on Graph Neural Networks...
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Philippe Canal (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))25/05/2026, 14:39Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
In 2023, DUNE began re-evaluating the requirements of its data-processing framework, which led to commissioning a new design that would better fit neutrino physics than the existing reconstruction frameworks designed for collider physics. Due to the radical changes expected, significant multi-institutional effort has been directed toward the creation of the Phlex framework. In addition, the...
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Pawel Kopciewicz (CERN)25/05/2026, 14:57Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
This talk presents the development of an agentic chatbot for the LHCb experiment, a project realized in cooperation with ItGPT, the AI Chatbot collaboration at CERN. The assistant is intended to support learning, operations, software development, and data analysis tasks.
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The LHCb knowledge base is structured in three access tiers: public, CERN-shared, and internal. The internal knowledge... -
Pol Muรฑoz Pastor (La Salle, Ramon Llull University (ES))25/05/2026, 16:15Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
For over 20 years, the Gaudi framework has been used by major HEP experiments, including the LHCb and ATLAS experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but also in the Future Circular Collider (FCC) studies. Testing mechanisms have been present almost from the beginning of the framework, but the number of applications and the corresponding amount of code to validate have increased...
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Tai Sakuma (Princeton University), Tai Sakuma (Princeton University)25/05/2026, 16:33Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Hypothesis-awkward is a collection of Hypothesis strategies for Awkward Array. Awkward Array can represent a wide variety of layouts of nested, variable-length, mixed-type data that are common in HEP and other fields. Many tools that process Awkward Array are widely used and actively developed. Unit test cases of these tools often explicitly list many input samples in attempting to cover...
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25/05/2026, 16:51Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Reliable floating-point behavior is increasingly difficult to ensure as HEP applications adopt heterogeneous architectures, multiple GPU vendors, and aggressive compiler optimizations such as fast-math. We introduce a non-intrusive workflow that enables detailed floating-point error analysis of GPU kernels without modifying application code. The method records SYCL kernel executions on Intel...
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Scott Snyder (Brookhaven National Laboratory (US))25/05/2026, 17:09Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
For the development of its offline C++ software, ATLAS uses a custom static checker. This is implemented as a gcc plugin and is automatically enabled for all gcc compilations by the ATLAS build system. This was an important tool for the multithreaded migration of the ATLAS offline code, where it was used to flag constructs which are legal C++ but not thread-friendly. Besides thread-safety, the...
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Paul James Laycock (Universite de Geneve (CH))25/05/2026, 17:27Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA gravitational-wave (GW) detectors exchange and analyse data at low latency to identify GW signals and rapidly issue alerts to the astronomy community. This low-latency computing workflow comprises multiple complementary search pipelines that continuously process streaming detector data, followed by an orchestration layer that produces an optimized GW event candidate...
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Quinn Campagna26/05/2026, 13:45Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
As the Belle II dataset grows towards a high luminosity scenario, the requirements for the distributed computing framework have grown in complexity and scale. To ensure long-term software maintainability, the Belle II Distributed Computing team is implementing a feedback-driven development model. This approach bridges the gap between the end-user experience and system evolution, aiming for...
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Ilija Vukotic (University of Chicago (US))26/05/2026, 14:03Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
We present the development of an AI Assistant designed to support ATLAS computing operations and users at the UChicago/MWT2 facilities. A significant portion of effort in distributed computing is spent helping users, debugging systems, optimizing workflows, and maintaining a diverse ecosystem of tools and services. Modern large language models offer a practical opportunity to reduce this...
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475. Exploring AI-Assisted Coding for Storage Systems: Practical Examples and Preliminary EvaluationAndreas Joachim Peters (CERN)26/05/2026, 14:21Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Advances in AI-assisted code generation are changing how complex software systems are designed, built, and improved over time. In storage software development for scientific computing, we explore how AI-based code synthesis and refinement workflows can speed up prototyping, strengthen maintainability, and clearly express architectural intent.
We present several practical examples developed...
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Anwar Ibrahim (HSE University)26/05/2026, 14:39Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Particle accelerator beamline optimization is a high-dimensional control problem traditionally requiring significant expert intervention. We present RLABC (Reinforcement Learning for Accelerator Beamline Control), an open-source Python framework that automatically transforms standard Elegant beamline configurations into reinforcement learning environments. RLABC integrates with the widely-used...
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Jolly Chen (CERN & University of Twente (NL))26/05/2026, 16:15Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
C++ compile-time metaprogramming techniques - commonly known as โtemplatesโ - are extensively used in HEP code to write reusable code and perform optimisations at compile-time. In 2026, the new C++26 standard will be released, including major new compile-time programming features such as reflection,
Go to contribution pagetemplate for, constexpr if, constexpr allocations, consteval, etc. Reflection could make... -
Matthias Kretz (GSI Helmholtzzentrum fรผr Schwerionenforschung)26/05/2026, 16:33Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
For HEP software, longevity is a core requirement: code often outlives several hardware generations. Using a standardized solution for dataโparallelism is therefore the most direct path to sustainable, reusable optimizations. As the lead author of std::simd in the C++ standard and the libstdc++ implementation, I will show how C++26โs std::simd provides a concrete, standards-based illustration...
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Mateusz Jakub Fila (CERN)26/05/2026, 16:51Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Julia has gained attention in high-energy physics (HEP) as a programming language that combines high-level expressiveness with competitive performance. This work explores its potential as a replacement for C++ in HEP applications, in particular in the context of trigger and reconstruction. The studies reported here include ahead-of-time compilation of jet reconstruction packages, a scheduling...
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Silia Taider (CERN)26/05/2026, 17:09Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
High Energy Physics (HEP) software environments make extensive use of blended C++ and Python workflows, combining performance and simple interfaces. In this context, a C++ compiler stack comprising technologies such as Clang, Cling, and cppyy provides generic dynamic Python-C++ bindings and powers many of the Python interfaces used in the field, including those of the ROOT software...
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Giacomo Parolini (CERN)26/05/2026, 17:27Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The ROOT file is the most widely used format for storing data in HEP. ROOT's TFile, alongside its ancillary
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classes, is the main interface to ROOT files, featuring a large number of functionalities both basic and advanced. TFile was designed in the 90's and evolved organically during the past 3 decades and it is still one of the pillars of any interaction with ROOT. However, 30 years of... -
Radoslaw Karabowicz (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE))26/05/2026, 17:45Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
FairRoot integrates RNTuple and allows users seamless transition to ROOTโs novel I/O backend, resulting in significant performance gains and file size decrease.
This contribution details the incorporation of RNTuple into the FairRoot framework. The RNTuple novel columnar data storage is applied subsequently to experiment simulation and data reconstruction and allows for comparison between...
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Peter Elmer (Princeton University (US))27/05/2026, 13:45Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Due to their scale, complexity and cost, large physics/astrophysics projects are very often international โteam-scienceโ endeavors. These scientific communities have been learning how to build collaborations that build upon regional capabilities and interests over decades, iteratively with each new generation of large scientific facilities required to advance their scientific knowledge....
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Caterina Doglioni (The University of Manchester (GB))27/05/2026, 14:03Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The EU-funded EVERSE project aims to establish a framework for research software and code excellence, collaboratively designed and championed by five European research communities, including physics and astronomy.EVERSEโs ultimate ambition is to contribute towards a cultural change where research software is recognized as a first-class citizen of the scientific process and the people that...
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Matthew Feickert (University of Wisconsin Madison (US))27/05/2026, 14:21Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The packaging of high energy physics software with robust, yet flexible, distribution methods is a complicated problem that has been met with multiple approaches by the community. The HEP Packaging Coordination community project expands packaging of the HEP software ecosystem through building and distributing language-agnostic conda packages on...
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George Hallett (University of Warwick (GB))27/05/2026, 14:39Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The LHCb Analysis Productions system provides a large scale, centralised, and reproducible framework for executing analysis workflows on the grid using officially released LHCb software. However, some analyses require prototyping or development of custom modifications to core packages, which cannot easily be deployed within the standard release cycle. It is therefore desirable to enable...
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Dr Gavin Davies (University Of Mississippi)27/05/2026, 14:57Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
The NOvA experiment has delivered world-leading neutrino physics results over ten years, enabled by an evolving software and computing infrastructure that has adapted to major technical transitions while maintaining operational stability. This talk discusses how NOvA has integrated modern AI/ML workflows into traditional HEP pipelines and balanced innovation against the demands of continuous...
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Dr Florian Rehm (CERN), Mr Luke Jason van Leijenhorst (CERN)27/05/2026, 16:15Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Efficiently retrieving knowledge from particle physics research and documentation within CERN presents significant challenges due to specialized terminology and complex structural dependencies. This work presents the evolution of AccGPT, a CERN internal knowledge retrieval system, moving beyond baseline Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to address these limitations. We introduce a composite...
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Dr Jerome LAURET (Brookhaven National Laboratory)27/05/2026, 16:33Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
Large-scale nuclear and particle physics experiments face a dual preservation challenge: maintaining long-term access to vast data volumes and the tacit scientific knowledge embedded in internal, often private or restricted, collaboration records. Public large language models (LLMs) cannot address this need for private data. To solve this, we developed SciBot, a locally deployed,...
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FNU Mohammad Atif (Brookhaven National Laboratory)27/05/2026, 16:51Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
In the ATLAS experiment, physics reconstruction and validation workflows produce large collections of histograms that must be compared across software versions to detect unexpected changes. Tracing these discrepancies back to their origins in complex codebases like Athena is time consuming and error prone. We present an approach to automate this root-cause analysis by combining vision-enabled...
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Panagiotis Gkonis (CERN)27/05/2026, 17:09Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
CERNโs compute farm must sustain 24/7 operation across thousands of worker nodes, a scale that will further expand for LHC Run 4 and beyond. Faults are frequent, both hardware- and software-related, and while some downtime is acceptable, extended recovery periods lead to measurable loss of throughput and operational efficiency. The existing automation system, based on hard-coded decision...
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Harris Tzovanakis (CERN)27/05/2026, 17:27Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
INSPIREHEP is evolving toward a new search and discovery platform that combines AI assisted retrieval with a unified service for metadata and content processing. This contribution presents the design and planned deployment of two core components. The first is an AI based retrieval pipeline that enriches records with embeddings, improves ranking behaviour, and supports natural language queries....
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FU Shiyuan fusy27/05/2026, 17:45Track 6 - Software environment and maintainabilityOral Presentation
At large-scale scientific facilities such as High Energy Photon Source (HEPS), diverse experimental techniques and detection methods have led to a proliferation of highly specialized data processing software. These tools often feature heterogeneous interfaces and complex parameters, imposing significant cognitive and operational burdens on users, software developers, and technical support...
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