Brief description: The LHC experiments are modern wonders of custom precision instrumentation. But the 1’s and 0’s that come out of the data acquisition system won’t discover new phenomena without a lot of help from software and computing. In this presentation I’ll discuss the many ways that computing and software are used in an LHC experiment to let us do the science, using the observation of the Higgs boson as an example.
Speaker's short bio: Ken Bloom is a Professor in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Visiting Scientist at Fermilab in the United States. He knows nothing about computer science, but has worked on various aspects of software and computing for particle physics experiments for about twenty years. He is currently the Software and Computing Manager for the U.S. CMS Operations program, overseeing the U.S. contributions to CMS software and computing facilities, operations and development. Bloom can still read C++ code and hopes to finally learn some Python this summer.
