The debris of collisions at unprecedented energy and intensity scales will produce an astonishing number of data. The study therefore explores detector concepts to observe and record the collision results, in the context of the staged scenario of a lepton collider (FCC-ee) as a first step followed by an energy-frontier hadron machine (FCC-hh) as the ultimate goal.

For years, commodity computing and data communication technology kept pace with the ever growing data processing needs of high-energy physics research. However, significant paradigm shifts in commodity computing and networking and the wish to approach a global computing ecosystem that can serve more than one science community call for a computing R&D initiative.

The first stage of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) project envisages lepton collisions at unprecedented luminosities at centre-of-mass energies between the Z pole and the top pair production threshold. The Physics Performance study group is working to identify the detector solutions capable fully exploiting the expected integrated luminosity, by throughly investigating a number of benchmark use-cases. A key component for these studies is the software and computing infrastructure. 

The data acquisition and trigger systems of the FCC-ee experiments must be designed to be as unbiased and robust as possible, with the goal of containing the systematic uncertainties associated with these datasets at the smallest possible level, in order to not compromise the extremely small statistical uncertainties

Key Challenges/Specific programmes:

• Creation of a world-wide initiative towards a shared high-performance data service ecosystem that can serve several science communities

• Exploration of novel wireless communication systems for scalable control and high-bandwidth data acquisition applications

• Improvement of programming and software maintenance efficiency

• Development of software system concepts with very long operation and upgrade lifecycles

• Development of innovative scalable and fault-tolerant control and communications platforms

• Study of robotic maintenance and repair concepts for remote computing and networking equipment

• Development of concepts for high-performace computing and networking under harsh environmental conditions (ionising radiation, large inaccessible areas)

Further information and more resources can be found on the dedicated webpages of the FCC Software Working Group (FCCSW).