1. Collaborating at a Distance Lucas Taylor, Northeastern University, Boston

2. Distributed Collaborations
LHC collaborations are global enterprises
Teams are distributed globally at all levels
Detector builders
Software developers
Computing operators
Physics analysis
Management, funding
Work in complex matrix organizations
CERN users by nation of institute (5 Feb 2008)
E.g. ATLAS experiment
37 countries
169 institutions
2500 scientific authors

3. Distributed Collaboration Needs
Distributed people need access to distributed information
Web … invented at CERN
Distributed people need access to distributed data & CPUs
Grid … developed with CERN
Distributed people need access to other distributed people
Communications systems

4. Communications Systems
Wide range of usual systems
Text: (too much), SMS (not much), instant messaging, news and discussion groups
Voice: phone, mobile, some VoIP, phone-conferencing
Video-conferencing: in-house (“EVO”), commercial (H.323)
Some coherence from CERN’s meeting management system
Give users a coherent view of many systems (e.g. “EVO”)
Number of
meetings per
year (as of
Sept 2008)

5. E.g. “EVO” video-conferencing
Desktops
18,900 registered users
600 users per day
160 meetings per day
H.323
MCU
Phones
EVO
SIP
Handheld
OpenGL Video
Monitoring /
MonALISA
Whiteboard /
Shared Files
Record /
Playback
IM / Chat
Lucas Taylor 5

6. Collaborative Working Tools
Web is ubiquitous in the daily tools
Controls, workflow management, monitoring …
Finance, HR, admin
Document servers
Wikis, e-learning ...
Software development
Task / bug tracker
Computing operations
Services monitoring
Operations centres
Shift operations
Physics data quality

7. Distributed Control Centres
Connecting local and remote communities
CMS Experiment Control Room
Remote Operations Centre at Fermilab
Permanently running video links to operations centres
CMS Centre at CERN: monitoring, computing operations, analysis
… also DESY (Hamburg), Dubna (Russia), Pisa, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro … others

8. Distributed Collaboration
It works - the Web is central to everything
Particle physics community innovates as required to meet their needs
Web, Grid, …?
..and uses numerous commodity systems
Distributed Collaboration is crucial to the success of Particle Physics
Especially in the coming physics analysis phase
… next talk …

9. Collaborating at a Distance
Thank you !
Collaborating at a Distance