6th Particle Physics Computing Summer School held

The Computing Summer School, organized by the Particle Physics Computing Consortium of Japan, was held for five days from July 31 to August 4, 2023. The Particle Physics Computing Consortium is a community on computing and software technology in the fields of elementary particle physics, nuclear physics, cosmic rays, and astrophysics. This summer school for graduate students is one of the main activities of the consortium. This was the 6th Computing Summer School, which began in 2017.

This year, 40 students from 15 universities participated in the summer school, which was held at KEK's Tsukuba Campus. Seven staff members of the KEK Computing Research Center contributed as lecturers. In addition, a person who was a student of the summer school in 2018 participated again as a lecturer of Belle II software. We felt that this is a good cycle to continue this summer school in the future.  The course content covered a wide range of topics, including programming languages, Deep Learning, and Quantum Computing. The computing environment used for the courses was built on an academic cloud server called mdx (see website below). Since many participants were interested in Dep Learning in previous years, GPU-enabled environments were also provided on mdx. The participants were asked to choose their own practical training theme during the summer school, and to present the results on the final day. Despite the short training time, many presentations showed a great deal of ingenuity and creativity. We hope that this summer school will help the participants in their future research activities.

Picture of participants
 Scene during course
 Scene during practice time

This summer school was supported by the International Center for Elementary Particle Physics at the University of Tokyo, and the IINAS-NX program of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK).