CMS Bulletin

COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

The CMS Communications Group, established at the start of 2010, has been busy in all three areas of its responsibility: (1) Communications Infrastructure, (2) Information Systems, and (3) Outreach and Education.

Communications Infrastructure

There are now 55 CMS Centres worldwide that are well used by physicists working on remote CMS shifts, Computing operations, data quality monitoring, data analysis and outreach. The CMS Centre@CERN in Meyrin, is the centre of the CMS offline and computing operations, hosting dedicated analysis efforts such as during the CMS Heavy Ion lead-lead running. With a majority of CMS sub-detectors now operating in a “shifterless” mode, many monitoring operations are now routinely performed from there, rather than in the main Control Room at P5.

The CMS Communications Group, CERN IT and the EVO team are providing excellent videoconferencing support for the rapidly-increasing number of CMS meetings. In parallel, CERN IT and the LHC experiments are evaluating Vidyo, a possible commercial alternative, with the view to reaching a conclusion on its viability at the end of Spring 2011.

Two new CMS meeting rooms are being set up in buildings 28 and 42, next to building 40, and the P5 meeting room is being improved. All 15 CMS meeting rooms at CERN are due for significant refurbishment during 2011 – 2012 due to ageing equipment that is starting to fail.

The Communications Group also provides the CMS-TV (web) channels that broadcast the LHC status, the new CMS Page 1 from the WBM group, DAQ Page 1, live event displays from P5 and outreach material on public screens at CERN and in CMS institutes worldwide. Being fully web-based, anyone in the world can see what is happening at CMS at any time.

Figure 10: CMS Page 1

Information Systems

The rapid transition from the CMS construction phase to the physics analysis phase has left the CMS information systems in need of significant re-vamping, including the many web sites and document management systems. The CMS information landscape is intrinsically complex, as shown below.

Figure 11: The CMS information landscape

Although many of the individual systems are well-structured, the 500 “official” CMS web sites that have grown organically over the years have no overall coherence. The navigation within and between systems is very poor and the search systems are inadequate.

In line with the central CERN web services, the Communications Group is migrating the core CMS Public and internal Web sites to use Drupal, an open-source “Content Management System”. This will establish a completely comprehensible navigation system by managing the site structure, links and content in a coherent manner. Search functionality is being established that will enable users to search within all systems shown in the figure above at once (the web, CDS, CADI, CINCO, Indico, and so on). This new CMS site should be in production in June 2011.

CMS already has 171k documents (files) in Indico, 140k in the Twiki, 55k in DocDB and 8k in CDS, with many more in CADI, CINCO, EDMS, iCMS. These are all managed systems, which guarantee long-term preservation and have “browse” and “search” capabilities. However, there remain more than 100,000 other important documents from the R&D, construction and commissioning phases of CMS that currently reside on afs, dfs, local file systems and the aforementioned ~500 CMS Web sites. To ensure these files are not lost permanently and that they may be found when needed, the Communications group is leading a major effort to search for all such documents and import them into a managed system, usually DocDB.

All CMS users are encouraged to upload any documents or files of general interest using the simple web interface: https://cms-docdb.cern.ch/cgi-bin/DocDB/ DocumentDatabase. Tools have been established to automate the bulk harvesting and uploading of existing documents for large collections – just contact us if you wish to use them. Using this bulk upload tool 40,000 files have been selected and uploaded over the last few weeks, from a total sample of about 66k files processed.

Outreach and Education

The press interest in the LHC remains high. Highlights picked up by the media recently include the First Heavy Ion Results, Microscopic Black Holes, First Results on the Higgs Search, and the First SUSY results. In each case the Communications Group prepared material for the press, including a written “CMS Statement” (see figure below) including simplified explanations, supplementary images and further links.

Figure 12: Example of a CMS Statement.

Following an initiative from IPPOG, the International Particle Physics Outreach Group, we will soon start to prepare, with the Physics Groups, so-called “Discovery Packages”. These are sets of resources suitable for all audiences (general public, media, schools, other physicists) related to possible CMS discoveries or major measurements. Each package will address a number of questions (e.g. What is the Higgs? How was it discovered?  What are the implications? etc.)  in a variety of ways: with textual explanations, images, movie clips etc. This preparatory work will be done in close collaboration with the other LHC experiments, CERN and others involved in Outreach, including IPPOG of course.

The CMS Times continues to be published every two weeks and now has a regular following of about 1500 people both inside and outside the collaboration. Stories focus on the operations of the LHC and CMS, the various physics results and events of human interest such as conferences, visits and educational activities. We are making more use of Web 2.0 tools (Twitter, Facebook etc.) to reach the public. The Google “Street View” team filmed underground at P5 during the winter break and will make the footage publicly available as part of a CERN site-wide initiative of UNESCO; naturally privacy and security concerns are being addressed.

There are many other ongoing outreach activities. One of the most visible in the pipeline will be the full size high-resolution photo display of the CMS detector to be installed in building 40, as shown below.

Figure 13: Proposed photo display at building 40.

CMS is active in a number of educational programmes including the IPPOG Masterclasses (Europe, USA and elsewhere) as well as Quarknet and I2U2 in the USA. Following an agreement by the Collaboration Board in 2010, CMS is providing small samples of real event data (J/ψ decays, Υs and Zs) to students. Members of the CMS Communications Group are also involved in the production of realistic web-based tools for interactive event display and simple statistical analyses in order to profit from this availability of data. These have already proven to be extremely popular with students and teachers alike, as more countries and curricula are trying to adopt “enquiry-based learning” techniques into their classrooms.