Open MC Generation task force

Wednesday 4 Feb 2026, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Zurich

remote only

4th meeting towards a white paper on Open MC Generation, to discuss the concrete contents of the draft developed so far. By now most of the content should be there, so the task will be to start polishing.

Section 1:

• We’ll need someone to finish writing the introduction and abstract. Probably easy once the rest is done.

 

Section 2.2:

• CMS updates are in place. Didn’t add many technicalities. Agreed to keep the metadata item lists separate.

• The examples in 2.2.3 will be expanded [Julie]

• Go through CMS text for comments [All]

• Start to move common text up to the Section 2 lead, align ATLAS text with CMS, and consider moving ATLAS details to an appendix or removing [Zach]

 

Section 2.3: 

• We should adjust this because we aren’t expecting something from ALICE or LHCb here [Zach—>Done]

• We should mention HEPData: that this is histograms, so insufficient (but available) [Zach—>Done]

 

Section 3.1:

• Add a link here to financial and carbon savings: forward reference to Section 4 [Zach—>Done]

 

Section 3.2: 

• It’s not obvious if this is in scope for this open evgen-focused white paper. Please read and send comments to Humberto Reyes about what can be re-emphasized, what might move to Section 5, and what should be used for another paper [All]

 

Section 3.3:

• No production-ready figures yet, but intending to include those — ~2 weeks or so [Rakhi]

• Problems are certainly in-scope; will be written as a paragraph [Rakhi]

• Should forward reference 5.4 as a solution to some of the problems [Rakhi]

 

Section 3.4:

• We’d like to have a "user experience” paragraph describing any pain points or chances for improvement [Jon/Eda]

• Make sure that the labels in Fig 1 indicate that this is ATLAS MC [Jon/Eda]

 

Section 3.5:

• Text is a bit WIP — will be finalized this week and then we can make suggestions [Tomasz Procter, then All]

• Will also add some user experience text and add a figure (just making it pretty) [Tomasz]

 

Section 3.6:

• Seems mostly open data (not just evgen) — read and check for emphasis on evgen, send suggestions to  Andrzej Konrad Siodmok [All]

• Could also include notes on how the future work would be better / easier with open evgen

 

Section 4:

 

Section 4.1:

• These ‘ATLAS notes' should be commented out [Zach—>Done]

• A real financial impact section should be written. Storage savings should be based on data sharing. We can use google cloud costs for quick estimates of CPU costs. The projections are a bit trickier, but we can try to cook something up — see if there’s a cloud cost historical record and extrapolation forward ~5 years. [Giovanni]

 

Section 4.2:

• The current draft (from Rakhi) is ready for comment [All]

• Will add laptop numbers for pheno [Rakhi]

• Currently using an average global power grid carbon intensity. We could add some extremes or a range, or try to do something more precise. A simple couple of data points would be using the US and Slovenia for ATLAS (where considerable event generation takes place). Zach will attempt to extract ATLAS event generation work by country [Zach—>Done] and Rakhi will try to run numbers to see what we’d get [Rakhi]

• Will try to integrate a few more changes into the text this week [Rakhi]

 

Section 4 is very ATLAS-centric; we agreed that for now that’s fine.

 

Section 5.1: 

• Enrico Bothmann and Chris G have taken care of this mostly — please read and comment [All]

 

Section 5.2:

• Ready for comment [All]

 

Section 5.3:

• Needs to be expanded from notes into text [Sabine]

 

Section 5.4:

• Notes below the line will be checked and integrated into the text as appropriate [Giovanni]

• Having a maintained central repository could also be useful (cross-compatibility remains an issue). More than just compute capacity, having a real workflow framework / curated environments should show up here; light user interface; High-Tea might be a good use-case to look at. Some text should be added [Giovanni]

 

Acknowledgements:

• Make sure you add any required acknowledgements or grants [All]

 

Next meeting in 2–3 weeks, perhaps not in this Wednesday time slot. To be organized [Sabine]

16:00 → 16:20 Review and harmonisation of section 2

16:20 → 16:40 Review of use cases (section 3)

16:40 → 17:00 Review of sections 4 and 5

17:00 → 17:20 General discussion