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- Documentation improvements: New releases of tools (netbeans, maven, etc) have become available and the documentation and tutorials on the org.lcsim website need to be updated to reflect this. Documentation also needs to be written on the many new reconstruction tools developed recently as part of the LOI effort, and improved documentation on AIDA is required, especially in the area of fitting, advanced plots.
- User Support: On going support for helping new users get started with the framework, responding to user questions on the forums and elsewhere and responding to requests for enhancements.
- Maintenance: Work is needed to maintain and upgrade the low level tools used for the computing effort, including cvs repository (as well as potentially upgrading to subversion), forums,
- LCIO: Based on user feedback during the LOI process we have identified a number of limitations in the current LCIO format. In collaboration with LCIO developers at DESY and elsewhere we plan to:
- Add support for more detailed reconstruction output.
- Add support for more efficient analysis of large data samples, including efficient random access to events selected on meta-data tags.
- Geometry: When the detector R&D tools were first developed we were using very idealized detector geometries. As the studies have become more sophisticated the requirements to support more detailed geometries has increased, and more work is needed in this area to improve support for complex geometries in both org.lcsim and SLIC. In the past we have made fledgling efforts to standardize geometry descriptions with other developers worldwide in the same way as we have standardized IO formats, but up to now those efforts have not gained much traction. A new drive to develop a standard geometry description may be more successful. In addition we will update SLIC to use latest GDML standards and add support for more realistic detector mechanics and response modeling.
- Interoperability: org.lcsim has adopted AIDA as its analysis toolkit and this works well for many users. However some users, in particular those familiar with the LHC analysis environments would like to be able to use org.lcsim but perform their final analysis with ROOT. Unfortunately ROOT is very limited in its support for IO formats and interoperability with Java, and in particular is not able to read LCIO files, or AIDA files. While we will continue to encourage the ROOT developers to improve this situation, we would also like to add support into the org.lcsim framework for writing AIDA tuples and histograms out in ROOT format.
- JAS plugins: org.lcsim includes a number of plugins to integrate detector R&D specifically functionality into the JAS interactive GUI. These plugins are in need of enhancements and better support. In addition the org.lcsim users have become accustomed to the code editors available within modern IDE's, which incorporate syntax highlighting, code completion, integrated documentation etc, and in comparison the analysis code editing features in JAS seem very dated. Work is needed to make similar editing tools available as JAS plugins and to provide closer integration between JAS and integrated developer environments such as Netbeans.
- Plotting: One frequent user request has been for improved control over plotting styles, especially in light of the need to create publication quality plots. Code to support this was under development but has been stalled for nearly two years due to manpower cuts. This work should be completed.
- Many-core CPU support: In order to be able to provide highly performant interactive response, and to efficiently exploit modern computing hardware the org.lcsim framework needs to be updated to support parallel execution on many-core CPUs. Fortunately the org.lcsim framework is well suited to this, since Java and the core libraries we use have built-in support for multi-threading and concurrency. Work is needed to remove bottlenecks from the user-developed reconstruction code to make it possible to fully support many-core CPUs.
- WBS?:
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