Personnel status

1. Personnel status Preparation of discussion at next CB

2. Reminder (December LHCb week CB) • Currently available people insufficient to cover all activities • Estimate ~40 FTE needed • 22.6 FTE available for operations • ~5 FTE working on Gaudi and DIRAC development • ~3 FTE working on new activities • Shortfall ~10 FTE • Mandate computing management to • Prepare project breakdown into work packages • Seek voluntary commitments from institutes/countries • Prepare detailed report on sharing of responsibilities, including if needed a proposal for addressing any shortfall

3. Finding new people • Following CB presentation, ~3 new FTEs identified • Ongoing effort in some countries to look for new opportunities • New funding (but tied to specific R&D project) • Collaborations with IT departments • Detailed breakdown of computing tasks distributed to NCB members at end March • Disappointing response • Only three answers • Minor corrections to FTE numbers but no real difference to shortfall • Precise definition of needs and commitments difficult due to ill defined boundaries between core computing, physics software and operational activities outside the scope of the tasks document • No new institutional commitments • Maintaining a list of active personnel is virtually impossible • People leave and are not replaced • Institutes/countries do not report changes in available people

4. Where are we today? • FTE needed: 46.5 FTE actual: 33.2 • Shortfalls in all areas

5. Where do they come from?

6. What is not covered? • Core Computing Infrastructure • Insufficient support for CERN infrastructure • e.g. followup of Vidyo issues • No effort available to support documentation and tutorials • e.g. software tutorials for newcomers discontinued • Development of infrastructure for software development, optimisation and testing postponed to next year • Core software development • Shortages everywhere, but in particular insufficient effort to build up expertise with vectorisation and efficient use of new languages (C++11) • Physics software • DaVinci coordinator • Gauss consolidation

7. What is not covered (2) • Distributed computing • Data management development • Support changes in computing model to optimise use of storage • Evolve system to new technologies • Data Preservation • Definition of strategies and policies for software preservation • Definition of affordable bit preservation strategies • Project Management • Coordination of developments with other experiments

8. Summary of current situation • Tasks breakdown confirms that: • We have sufficient effort in all areas to keep current computing infrastructure and software running efficiently. • We are forced to postpone R&D that will be essential for the latter part of Run 2 and for the upgrade. • A handful of countries have identified a few opportunities for new effort • Disappointingly: • Not all countries have given feedback • A number of positions have not been replaced • There are few if any openings in the collaboration for young physicists wishing to participate in computing activities

9. Options for the collaboration • Keep the status quo • Forget ambitious plans for upgrade HLT and data processing • Expect deterioration in quality of LHCb computing, as existing staff become more overstretched • Require minimum long term contribution to computing from each country • Will initiate series of dedicated meetings between collaboration management and countries to explore this • How canlong term commitmentbe enforced? • Introduce a ‘tax’ for computing, to allow recruitment of missing manpower • Either ‘in kind’ if employed by the countries • OrM&O cash to hire at CERN (more expensive!)