# Optimising the computational footprint in precision particle physics

- Institution: CERN
- Department: TH institutes
- Taught by: Peter Skands, Christian Preuss
- Year: 2022
- Language: English
- Subjects: Physics
- Source: [CERN](https://videos.cern.ch/record/3004266)
- Licence: [CERN](http://copyright.web.cern.ch)
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (sources give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the source's own words)

During 2020, I was working on a grant proposal in precision particle physics, on so-called matching and merging strategies, for the widely used Pythia event generator. For complex processes, these types of calculations can be quite resource-intensive. That same summer, my home country of Australia had experienced catastrophic bush fires. It made me reconsider what I was doing, proposing calculations that would take immense computing resources to perform. I rewrote the grant with a central focus on reducing the computational footprint necessary to do these calculations - but still pushing the state of the art. The grant was awarded and we are now beginning to work in this direction. It was the first grant proposal I have written in which reduction of computational footprint in itself had been an explicit goal.

## Lectures

1. [Optimising the computational footprint in precision particle physics](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/cern/3004266/0ef0c2295dee), 14 min (CERN's player)