Technology Watch Working Group

The mission of this Working Group is to monitor the relevant evolution, both in terms of technology and markets, of the computing equipment that is relevant to the HEPiX Community.

In particular, the Working Group has the following duties:

• Understand the trends and the direction of the technology markets using publicly available sources
• Assist in making cost predictions and optimizing investments, taking also into account sustainability
• Provide a risk assessment for technologies, also financially when possible
• Leverage the expertise of the HEPiX community
• Inform the HEPiX board about technologies that may warrant a more in-depth investigation

The Working Group’s scope covers hardware that is used or can be used in data centers participating to HEP/NP-related computing activities. It does not cover technologies solely applicable to DAQ systems or software technologies unless they are essential to enable a particular hardware technology.

The group will co-exist and align with existing activities, most notably the running working group on benchmarking.

Chairs

The group is jointly chaired by Andrea Chierici, Shigeki Misawa and Andrea Sciaba.

References to earlier work

• Bernd Panzer’s Wiki: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Main/TechMarketPerf
• Helge Meinhard’s presentation at Spring 2019 HEPiX: https://indico.cern.ch/event/765497/contributions/3348835/

Subgroups

The definition of the subgroups and their members are:

• General market trends
  Conveners: Shigeki Misawa
  Other members: Xavier Espinal, Andrea Sciaba, James Walder
• Server and data center infrastructure
  Conveners: Tristan Suerink
  Other members: Andrea Chierici, Michele Michelotto, Eric Yen
• Processing units, memory, buses and interconnects
  Conveners: Andrea Chierici
  Other members: Erik Kooistra, Dhruva Kulkarni, Charles Leggett, Michele Michelotto, Andrea Sciaba, Andrea Valassi
• Storage
  Conveners: TBD
  Other members: Thomas Byrne, Martin Gasthuber, Alison Packer, Vladimir Sapunenko
• Network
  Conveners: Harvey Newman
  Other members: Dhruva Kulkarni, James Walder

Meetings

• Agenda of meetings is found on Indico

Coming up

Interested to get in touch? Contact the chairs (see above), or join us at one of the following events, where we expect to present:

• HEPiX Spring 2024 workshop at IRFU CEA, Paris, from 15 to 19 April 2024 (website)

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