The awardees of this year’s ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Award included also a Czech scientist. Michal Svatoš, a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, was honoured for his fundamental contribution to the effective integration of supercomputers into the computing infrastructure of one of the largest physics experiments of our time – the ATLAS detector at the LHC accelerator at CERN.
The group of which Michal Svatoš is a member earned the award in the Computing & Software category, specifically for its contribution to the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). It successfully bridged the technological and organisational barriers between the world of supercomputing centres and the ATLAS collaboration. In addition to adapting to software development and new architecture, it also ensured workflow optimisation and efficient resource allocation. Although the work of this group of physicists is often ‘invisible,’ the result is concrete: more processed physical events, lower statistical error, and more accurate measurements.
"It's an honour and it means that what we do is useful – not only for my colleagues, but also for the ATLAS experiment management," said Michal Svatoš in response to the award. "Simply put, more computing resources mean better physics data," summarizes Michal Svatoš.
Michal Svatoš is one of four core members of the ATLAS Distributed Computing team who were behind the implementation of new solutions enabling the use of HPC resources – i.e., supercomputers – for demanding calculations in ATLAS. HPCs have been complementary resources to the ATLAS Grid for several years and are playing an increasingly important role.
This work is particularly important because the ATLAS computing environment is traditionally optimized for grid infrastructure, not for the more closed and rigid environment of supercomputers. The team contributed to several innovative solutions and deployed them for various HPC instances. This has played a key role in leveraging high-performance computing resources for the ATLAS experiment, significantly improving its data processing capabilities.
Resources provided by the IT4I research and innovation centre enabled Michal Svatoš to use the Karolina and Barbora supercomputers in Ostrava, Czech Republic, as well as the European megaproject LUMI in Finland. "By connecting these external computing resources, we can not only strengthen ATLAS, but also meet the requirements of another experiment – ALICE," explained Svatoš.
"I congratulate Michal Svatoš on the recognition of his long-term work on integrating supercomputers into the ATLAS computing ecosystem. His tireless efforts have contributed to the fact that, even after cuts in investment grants, we can still supply the necessary computing capacity to the WLCG on behalf of the Czech Republic," commented Jiří Chudoba from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
The award has been presented since 2014, and this year the ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards committee evaluated 65 nominations in 15 categories, ranging from detector technology to computing and software solutions. The award recognized work carried out between November 2023 and November 2024.