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Category
Funding
Owner

Funding Agencies

Risk Summary

WLCG Funding Agencies lack funding

Risk Detail

The funding agencies are unable to provide the funding to purchase the required level of resources to the experiments.

Effect

Cannot provide required resources to experiments; Not all physics programmes can be done, or will be delayed

Mitigation

Prioritise the physics programme of the experiments.

Comments

If the overall level of funding is significantly lower than the resource requests require, there will need to be a discussion with the LHCC and within the experiments in order to understand how to address the problem.

The cause of this may be either:

  • budget levels anticipated by the FA's ("flat budget") is no longer realistic
  • Experiment physics requests for computing and storage grow significantly more than anticpiated (e.g. demand for many MC samples, new phsyics channels)
  • Could also arise if the LHC performance is much better than anticipated (as seen in Run 2) where the amount of data exceeds the level of resource available.
  • Similarly, if the LHC is unstable, or there are changing conditions (energy, pile-up, etc), this may require additional simulations or reconstruction time that grows significantly.

There may be several (not exclusive) strategies:

  • Physics output is delayed. The expectation during Run 1 and 2 that physics results are produced as rapidly as possible may not be realistic in this situation.
  • The experiment internally may prioritise the physics channels that should have access to computing resources.
  • The amount of simulation that done could be reduced. This has potential impact on physics analysis and quality.
  • Some level of opportunistic resources have regularly been available. This may help the situation, but by definition it is not something that can be planned or foreseen in many cases.
Risk
Risk Impact
3
Risk Likelihood
4
Risk Severity
12

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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