Speaker
Description
The BaBar experiment collected electron-positron collisions at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1999-2008. Although data taking has stopped 15 years ago, the collaboration is still actively doing data analyses, publishing results, and giving presentations at international conferences. Special considerations were needed to do analyses using a computing environment that was developed more than a decade ago. A framework is required that preserves the data, data access, and the capability of doing analyses using a well defined and preserved environment. Also, BaBar’s support by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the place where the experiment took place, ended at the beginning of 2021. Fortunately, the HEP Research Computing group at the University of Victoria (UVic), Canada, offered to be the new home for the main BaBar computing infrastructure, GridKa offered to host all data for access by analyses running at UVic, and CERN and IN2P3 offered to store a backup of all data. In this talk, we will present what was done at BaBar to preserve the data and analysis capabilities and needed to move the whole computing infrastructure, including collaboration tools and data files, away from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It will be shown how BaBar preserved the ability to continue to do data analyses and also have a working collaboration tools infrastructure. The talk will detail what was needed to move the different bits of an experiment’s computing infrastructure to a new home, access the data from a different location, and how to move to more modern systems where older infrastructure could not be used anymore. The talk will be focused on BaBar’s experience with such a big change in its infrastructure and what was learned from it, which may be useful to other experiments which are interested in long term analysis support and data preservation in general.
| Consider for long presentation | Yes |
|---|
