HyperCP analysis called a tour de force


Tim Holmstrom, a graduate student from UVa, gave a presentation on how HyperCP reconstructed the 231 billion events taken in the 1997 and 1999 runs at the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics} in Beijing, China, in September, 2001. The conference summary speaker highlighted this effort as a "tour de force". This is the largest data set ever analyzed (although, undoubtedly, soon to be surpassed), and is 25 times larger than all the data on all of the WWW pages in the entire world! It took nine months of hard work on the Fermilab computer farms. The UVa group, in particular, Lanchun Lu and Tim Holmstrom, had a major role in setting up and running the farms, and writing a Web-based interface that allowed the farm analysis to be run remotely by non-experts.

Shown below is the Xi and anti-Xi masses from the farm analysis. We have by far the most Xi, Omega, and charged kaons every reconstructed. To our knowledge, no mass peak has ever been made with as many entries.