CSSI: Frameworks: X-Ion Collisions with a Statistically and Computationally Advanced Program Envelope (X-SCAPE)

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High-energy colliders around the world currently study the production of, and interaction between, a variety of subatomic particles and environments produced in the collision of protons with protons, with nuclei, or even between two nuclei, as at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), or at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The future Electron Ion Collider (EIC), slated for construction at BNL, will study collisions of electrons with protons and nuclei. Interactions at all these experiments are dominated by the strong nuclear force, whose behavior is still not well understood. Direct comparison between theory and experiment requires sophisticated computer simulations, where each stage of a collision is modeled via a combination of established principles or candidate theories. A complete simulation, consisting of a number of sub-simulations, depends on several input parameters. The extracted values for these parameters represent fundamental properties of strongly interacting matter. A simultaneous determination of these parameters, in extensive comparisons with volumes of data from diverse experiments, requires an elaborate statistical and computational framework. The X-SCAPE collaboration, a multi-disciplinary team of physicists, computer scientists and statisticians, is engaged in the construction of such an open-source framework. The expertise required to operate, modify and extend this framework is disseminated to practicing scientists via a combination of dedicated short-term schools (in-person and virtual), topical workshops, web tutorials, conference presentations and detailed publications.The X-SCAPE project encompasses the entire high-energy nuclear physics enterprise by providing a general purpose, modifiable, and modular framework, that incorporates all known interaction processes prevalent at these experiments. The developed software is designed to be portable onto hybrid architectures, where GPU acceleration can be applied to the most demanding computational tasks. Provided as a steadily improving package culminating in annual releases, X-SCAPE includes of i) the default distribution of baseline tools allowing for simplified simulations on commodity CPUs, ii) a refactored product for distributed architectures with GPUs, and iii) Bayesian statistical routines to both emulate and systematically explore the model space of parameters against diverse experimental data.This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Physics at the Information Frontier (PIF) Program within the Division of Physics and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.