MINOS Computing

The MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) Experiment is a long-baseline neutrino experiment designed to observe the phenomena of neutrino oscillations, an effect which is related to neutrino mass. MINOS uses two detectors, one located at Fermilab, at the source of the neutrinos, and the other located 450 miles away, in northern Minnesota, at the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Tower-Soudan.

MINOS is one of the two neutrino experiments that the Computing Sector supports directly.  Support is provided for the MINOS Computing and the MINOS Offline software. The computing support includes streamlining MINOS data handling, supporting Sequential Access with metadata (SAM) and raw data archiving, managing MINOS database , enabling analysis jobs to run on computing farms and grid resources, and moving simulation to the new C++ framework.

The event reconstruction for both MINOS detectors is done at Fermilab. The Far detector reconstruction of cosmic rays and atmospheric neutrino events has been running on the Computing Sector general purpose farm for a number of years and the Computing Sector is in the process of moving them to grid facilities.

The raw data from MINOS experiment is highly compressed, but it expands rapidly after event reconstructions when the de-multiplexed hits, tracking information and calibration are added. The Computing Sector has implemented sophisticated storage solutions, such as STKEN tape library and DCache, to accommodate the large amount of data from MINOS.

More Information: MINOS Offline Computing Documentation,   MINOS experiment and NuMI Beamline Home

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Last updated by cdweb on 04/29/2008