CMS Bulletin

PHYSICS PERFORMANCE & DATASET (PPD)

Despite the LHC shutdown, the past six months of 2013 have been extremely intense for our coordination area. All the PPD teams are engaged on three major fronts: the exploitation of the 2011 and 2012 data, the preparation of the post-LS1 data taking and the support to the studies for the upgrade of the detector.
Alignment and Calibration and Database (AlCaDB)

Work in the AlCaDB project followed the planning and moved into a consolidation phase. On the AlCa side, efforts mainly concentrated on providing and validating new calibration and alignment conditions as needed for the re-processing campaigns of 2011 and 2012 data and simulation of multiple upgrade scenarios. Also, work on improvements on the Global Tag Collector tool to manage these are ongoing. On the DB side, the major redesign of the core conditions software, as discussed in various meetings in the last months of 2012, is being finalised according to schedule. We plan to change over to the new DB structure in early 2014, well before the validation for the planned Monte Carlo processing campaigns.

Data Quality Monitoring (DQM)/Data Certification

With the certification of the 2012 data complete, attention has turned to the increased performance and automation of the DQM system for 2015 data taking. For data certification, we have used the Global Run in November to test the functionality of an automated run registration feature and the updated data certification procedure.

For the online, work is ongoing for data handling system to interface the new DAQ framework, a new integration of publishing protocols from DQM, and a more automated approach to the monitoring of the online DQM framework and cluster.

For the offline, significant strides have been made in preparing for a completely multi-threaded DQM environment for data processing. Successful tests will be used as a model for the migration of all software packages in the coming months. In addition to multi-threading, the functionality of the DQM GUI has been enhanced to include more comparative tools, which are needed to effectively validate simulation and data release cycles.

Physics Data Monte-Carlo Validation (PdmV)

The preparation for the legacy reprocessing of the 2011 7 TeV data and corresponding Monte Carlo (MC), has comprised multiple steps of validation of the alignment and calibration conditions. The reprocessing of the 5_3 CMSSW release was submitted in September and is now nearly completed. After extensive validation of the High Level Trigger menu ported to 53x, a final round of validation of alignment and calibration conditions will take place before the end of the year.

The construction of a suite of datasets and monitorable quantities for physics validation of MC versus data is in progress, as a joint venture with the DQM and PdmV teams. A set of samples spanning key final states and pile-up conditions have been identified and made available. The goal is to establish a well-understood set of benchmarks and deploy automated and DQM-based comparisons. This eases the physics validation of MC versus data and will be essential whilst facing the new data-taking conditions after LS1.

The Event Interpretation defines, in the context of the CMS event reconstruction, a disambiguating procedure to ascribe Particle Flow blocks to physics objects and provides a collection of reconstructed particles for which manipulations are already performed. The PdmV and DQM teams are developing extensions to the existing validation workflows that will permit the monitoring also of the event-interpreted reconstructed objects and their comparison with standard Particle Flow objects.

The MC production has seen the introduction of new campaigns, in order to provide samples in preparation of the 2015 data-taking exercise at 13 TeV. The McM platform for the MC production management is now generally used.