Summer Students - 2015

We are offering around five places for Summer Students in 2015.

We are looking for high-quality undergraduates who are currently in their 3^rd year studying physics

Successful applicants will work with our staff at RAL on one of our projects . These include ATLAS, CMS, Dark Matter, LHCb &T2K.

Studentships will be for typically 8 weeks, in the period June to September.

Students will be responsible for their own accommodation and transport, but will receive of the order of 320 pounds per week to cover their expenses.

Eligibility

Applicants should be in their 3^rd year, studying physics. They must be eligible to work in the UK.

How to Apply

We require completed CVs, along with a Letter of Recommendation from your university tutor, by 8^th March 2015.

• These should be sent separately by email to Jane.Bruffell@stfc.ac.uk.
• CVs should have "2015 PPD Summer Student Application" as the subject of the email. Do not include additional information in your email, but put it in your CV.
• Letters of Recommendation should have "2015 PPD Summer Student Reference" as the subject of the email.

Your CV should include:

• Name
• Home address
• Correspondence address if different
• Email address
• Contact phone number (s)
• Information about your current study:
  • University
  • Course name
  • Year of study (should be 3^rd year!)
  • Subjects studied
  • Results to date
• Past academic record
  • Schools
  • Dates
  • Subjects studied and results
• Past work experience
• Computing experience
• Interests and hobbies, etc

As well as

• Preferred period of Studentship (in June-September 2015) - at the top
• Confirmation that you are eligible to work in UK
• A statement as to why you are interested in a Studentship

Do not include useful information in your email, as it will get lost.

We hope to come to conclusions by end-March.

There is a certain amount of flexibility in start/end dates and we will try to match selected students to suitable projects.

If you have questions about the process or the programme, contact Stephen.Haywood@stfc.ac.uk

Projects

CMS trigger upgrade

The CMS experiment took the opportunity of the 2013/2014 shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider to replace certain crucial electronic components such as parts of the trigger system as well as overall trigger and timing control. The new systems are cutting-edge high tech, based on a commercial electronics standard, microTCA - widely used in telecommunications industry. Running microTCA infrastructure in particle physics is pushing the limits of what these systems can cope with. We need sophisticated software and microcontroller code to ensure and monitor safe and reliable operation of these new systems. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory plays a central role in designing, testing and operating these infrastructure functions.

We are offering summer projects in one or more of the following areas related to microTCA infrastructure:

• software development for a configuration database (python, mysql)
• implementation of microcontroller code for system control and monitoring (C/C++)
• development of tools for system management functions such as remote power control (python, bash)

Familiarity with Linux environments is highly recommended. You can make a real difference here, with any improvements, with your development on our test system at RAL being quickly moved to CERN to help make CMS a continued success!

Tracking Triggers for ATLAS

The ATLAS Trigger system makes fast, real-time, decisions on whether to keep data from interesting proton-proton collision events to be studied later, or discard them. We can only keep about 1 in 100,000 collisions. The High Level Trigger (HLT) includes fast software algorithms that process information from the Inner Detector to find charged particle tracks. Because of the huge number of particles produced in LHC collisions, the Inner Detector tracking software uses a lot of computing power - almost half of a farm of 20,000 processors is taken up by the task of reconstructing tracks in real time. We are investigating the use of Graphical Process Units (GPU) to speed up the tracking code. The first part of the project will be to help with the implementation and optimisation of the HLT tracking software on a GPU using the CUDA programming language. In 2024 the ATLAS tracker will be replaced as part of an extensive upgrade. In the second part of the project, you will help to adapt the CPU-based tracking code to work with the upgraded tracker and you will investigate the performance of this code by analysing the tracking results using the ROOT analysis package.

Interest in computing is essential, with some experience of programming in C++ or a similar language. Some knowledge of ROOT would be helpful but not essential.

Dates : flexible dates within 1/6 - 28/8

ATLAS Calorimeter Trigger Upgrade

We may be able to offer a project on the Calorimeter Trigger for ATLAS. The trigger is critical for the selection of events with high-energy electrons and photons. Without the existing trigger, the discovery of the Higgs Boson would not have been possible.