I’m just about to travel back to Clermont-Ferrand after two weeks in South Africa, where my longtime colleague Deepak Kar and I were running a residential research school at University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
CHACAL was funded by the French CNRS’s France-Africa international cooperation programme, with an open call to organise a “summer school” in Africa in partnership with an African institute . Deepak (Professor of Physics at Wits) and I successfully applied for this funding, building on our long history of cooperation, which dates back to 2017 when I first joined the ATLAS collaboration. Over that time we’ve both been active in Monte Carlo event generation and searches for unusual signatures.
“CHACAL” (Computing in High Energy Physics and Applications CNRS-Africa Lectures) focused on advanced computing techniques used to analyse data at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and beyond. Topics included general software skills, Monte Carlo event generation, machine learning and quantum computing. Lectures and hand-on tutorial were given by international experts from universities in France, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the USA.
In total 26 students, ranging from masters students to recent PhD graduates, attended CHACAL. They travelled from 10 African countries attended the school: Algeria, Botswana, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Morocco, Madagascar, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa. Around 45% of the students and 40% of the school staff were female. To facilitate engagement from a wide array of countries in Africa, the students’ travel, accommodation and meal were fully covered.
From a personal perspective, it has been wonderful to interact with the students at CHACAL: it’s rare to come across such a dedicated group. Even though they come from diverse backgrounds and levels of experience, they were united in their desire to learn and exchange knowledge with the lecturers. It was also great to get to know my ATLAS colleagues from Johannesburg and Cape Town, and their wonderful and talented students.
We also got to sample South African specialties like the famous Braai (not a barbecue), Milk tart and Malva cake!
I have to admit that I have learnt a lot, not just about organising events, but also some of the topics in which I was not an expert: quantum information and novel computing hardwares being a few such examples. One of my favourite facts from the two weeks is that Microsoft’s largest supercomputer…runs on a linux operating system !
I’ve been asked many times over the last two weeks if we plan to repeat the school: it’ll depend on the funding. But we have an open invitation to host the next CHACAL in the wine-making region of Stellenbosch, half an hour from Cape Town. There are worse ways to chase away the January blues…
PS: A benefit of hosting an event near Johannesburg is that the social outing can be a Safari (in our case in Pilanesberg National Park).
PPS: Many thanks to CNRS for providing this opportunity. Additional support was provided by iThemba Labs, South Africa’s National Research Foundation, and the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences.
Louie D. Corpe 