Peter Elmer is an experimental particle physicist whose area of expertise is developing the software and computing systems needed to operate and produce scientific results from data-intensive high energy physics experiments. His current research focuses on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). In the past he has worked on the ALEPH experiment at CERN and the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He received a Ph.D. in Experimental High Energy Physics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and is a Senior Research Physicist at Princeton University.
The LHC experiments have already produced exciting results such as the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, leading to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. They are now embarking on an evolving series of upgrades and data taking periods over the next 20 years to realize the full scientific potential of this facility. Elmer was a key player in developing the computing model of CMS and managed the implementation of much of the core software used today by the experiment. His current focus is on the R&D and planning for upgrades of the software and computing system required for the Exabyte-scale datasets expected from the high luminosity running at the LHC in the 2020's.
He is the Executive Director and Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) as well as Principal Investigator for two NSF-supported collaborative research projects: "FAIROS-HEP, a Research Coordination Network for Particle Physics" (an Open Science initiative) and Framework for Integrated Research Software Training for High Energy Physics (FIRST-HEP). He is co-PI for HSF-India, an NSF-funded project to build research software collaborations between the US, Europe and India, as well as the Princeton PI for ``TAC-HEP: Training to Advance Computational HEP in the Exascale Era'', a DOE-funded project to train the next-generation of computational scientists. From 2005-2019, he was a member of the US-CMS Software and Computing Project Execution Team. He is a member of the coordination team for the HEP Software Foundation, and maintains a long-running interest in building large, international research software collaborations. He was a founder for two summer schools: "Architectures, tools and methodologies for developing large scale scientific computing applications", sponsored by the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), and (from 2017) the NSF-sponsored school on Computational and Data Science for High Energy Physics (CoDaS-HEP).
Selected Publications
- Strategic Plan for a Scientific Software Innovation Institute (S2I2) for High Energy Physics, P.Elmer et. al. (2017) [arXiv 1712.06592]
- A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s (Community White Paper), HEP Software Foundation (A. A. Alves Jr. et al.) (2017) [arXiv 1712.06982]
- Planning the Future of U.S. Particle Physics (Snowmass 2013): Chapter 9: Computing, L.A.T. Bauerdick et. al., (2013) [arXiv 1401.6117]
- “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC”, CMS Collaboration (S. Chatrchyan et al.), Phys.Lett. B716:30-61 (2012)
- “CMS Computing Technical Report”, G. L. Bavatvan et al., Technical Report CERN-LHCC-2005-023 (2005)
- “XROOTD - A highly scalable architecture for data access”, A. Dorigo, P. Elmer, F. Furano and A. Hanushevsky WSEAS Transactions on Computers 4.3 (2005)
- “The new BaBar Analysis Model”, D. Brown et al., Proceedings of Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP 2004) , Interlaken (2004)
- “Observation of CP violation in the B0 meson system”, BaBar Collaboration (B. Aubert et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 87 , 091801 (2001)
- “The BaBar silicon vertex tracker”, BaBar Collaboration (C. Bozzi et al.), Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A453 78-83 (2000)
- “The new ALEPH silicon vertex detector”, ALEPH Collaboration (D. Creanza et al.), Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A409 , 157-160 (1998)