Implementation of Feldman-Cousins corrections and oscillation calculations in the HPC environment for the NOvA Experiment

Abstract

Analysis of neutrino oscillation data involves a combination of complex fitting procedures and statistical correction techniques that are used to determine the full three-flavor PMNS parameters and constraint contours. These techniques rely on computationally intensive “multi-universe” stochastic modeling. The process of calculating these contours and corrections can dominate final stages of the data analysis and become a bottleneck for examining the ef-fect of systematic variations on the final results. As part of the DOE SciDAC-4 sponsored research program, we present a new implementation of a neutrino oscillation fitting and framework to carry out calculations of Feldman-Cousins corrections. This implementation is specifically designed and optimized to operate on modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities. We present the performance of the system in calculating allowed regions for the NOvA experiment based on 8.9 x 1020 and 6.9 x 1020 protons-on-target (POT) neutrino and antineutrino datasets, and compare the performance of this new implementation run at the NERSC supercomputing facility with that from methods used previously by the NOvA collaboration running on grid computing facilities.