Oregon State Physics is part of a new $3.2 million consortium funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science to train the next generation of computational high-energy physicists.

The new Western Advanced Training for Computational High-Energy Physics (WATCHEP)[https://watchep.org] brings together six public universities and three national laboratories to create a tailored modular curriculum and offer intensive research opportunities during a two-year training period for graduate students. The specific training areas are hardware-software co-design, collaborative software infrastructure, and high-performance software and algorithms.

Co-PI, Prof. Heidi Schellman, of Oregon State Physics is developing online training materials as part of this project. We expect the first cohort of students to start in 2023.

As physics and astrophysics experiments collect more data for high-precision measurements, researchers have come to depend on large-scale computing infrastructure and high-performance computing algorithms. Many collaborations have dedicated experts in advanced computing technologies who are also experts in particle physics.

“Future high energy physics discoveries will require large accurate simulations and efficient collaborative software”, said Regina Rameika, DOE Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics (https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/department-energy-announces-10-million-traineeships-computational-high-energy). “These traineeships will educate the scientists and engineers necessary to design, develop, deploy, and maintain the software and computing infrastructure essential for the future of high energy physics.”

“The students from this program will become ‘computing ambassadors’ and take their cutting-edge expertise into the large science collaborations with enormous datasets and computational complexity” said Principal Investigator, UC Santa Cruz Physics professor Jason Nielsen. “A unique aspect of the program is additional training in communications, project leadership, and responsible conduct.”

The WATCHEP institutes joining Oregon State University in this program are UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, University of Washington, Brookhaven National Lab, Fermilab, and Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

See this link for the DOE award announcement.