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Category
Software
Owner

WLCG/HSF

Risk Summary

Lack of Investment in Software Skills

Risk Detail

The community and funding agencies fail to re-invest in advanced software skills to re-engineer the HEP software to effectively use modern compute and storage architectures.

Effect

Inability to improve performance of the experiments' cores software, or common packages such aas Geant, ROOT, and other libraries.

Mitigation

Training, education, hackathon programmes with HSF; projects such as IRIS-HEP, & other initiatives.

Set up a software institute and collaborate with Universities and national programmes to address the long term problem of recognition of software and computing as valid career tracks in a scientific career, particularly in Universities.

Comments

This is a problem faced in many sciences that depend on large scale computing. It has been called out as a problem in the WLCG Strategy, the HSF Whitepaper, and the 2019 ESPP Symposium. It is a long term issue, and needs to be addressed through national bodies and initiatives. The key problem for HL-LHC is essentially a software problem, and without this investment it will fail.

Risk
Risk Impact
3
Risk Likelihood
3
Risk Severity
9

Likelihood
1: never expected to happen | 2: could happen but very unlikely | 3: could well happen | 4: will probably happen

Impact
1: we can deal with it, no problem | 2: a bit of a hassle but not too bad | 3: can be managed, but with significant effort | 4: crisis


 

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