User Community Workplan

Our main goal is to establish a community of early adopters and users. They will come first from within Ultralight, and can be considered as expert users, as often they will have roles overlapping to some extent with the HEP application services group. Later, with the maturing of the Ultralight services and software, the community will grow to include outside users. This community will use the system being developed e.g. will start actual physics analysis efforts exploiting the test-bed, and provide a user perspective on the problems being solved.

The user community group will organize the early adoption of the system. It will play an active role by identifying the most valuable features of the system from the users perspective, to be released early at production quality level, or at useful level of functionality. This is "where the rubber will meet the road", and will provide rapid user feedback to the development team.

A key component of this group's work will be an evolving dialog with the HEP application services group. As a result of this collaboration the group will have it's input on the planning and scope of software releases, guided by what is expected to be most valuable for physics analysis and aligned with the milestones of the experiments, and helping to set priorities for implementing features.

We envisage the development, in collaboration with the applications group, of an expanding suite of functional tests. In contrast to unit tests, they provide an user view on the system, and can be very useful for measuring the progress of the project, as well as for educating new users and making it easier for them to pass the threshold for adopting the system. Users should be encouraged to provide new tests for important new features under implementation.

The physics analysis user community will study in depth the software framework of HEP applications (e.g. ORCA/COBRA for CMS or ATHENA for ATLAS), the data and metadata models of the experiments, stressing commonality where feasible and/or practical, and the steps to best integrate the Ultralight services in the experimental software systems. As the frameworks of the experiments are evolving and changing rapidly right now, this will be a continuing activity, which can provide an important input to the experiments about the exciting new possibilities which will be made possible by Ultralight.

In order to arrive to optimal integration of the Ultralight activities in the software systems of the experiments we will maintain close contacts with the people in charge of the software development in the experiments and respond to their requirements and needs.

The activities of the physics analysis user community will come fully to fruition by contributing to the ATLAS/CMS Physics preparation milestones, utilizing the services developed by Ultralight. Ultralight members are already active in LHC physics studies and are leading several analyses, officially recognized in CMS for the Physics Technical Design Report. The ultimate goal in the longer term is to enable physics analysis and LHC physics research, when the accelerator starts colliding beams and the experiments start taking data in 2007.