SWIFT-HEP Phase 1.5 begins

Phase-1 saw the establishment of a team across multiple UK institutes, with about a dozen people funded for part of their time to work on cross-experiment software. The model proved to be successful as it allowed developers with different experiment interests to work together on common projects. At the same time, it was challenging to recruit a few new people to work on the project, which caused some delays for some of the work packages.

The Phase-1.5 of the project has multiple purposes:

• We need to retain the staff we recruited to maintain the expertise that was created during Phase-1. Some of the staff are at the end of their contract and we need to ensure extensions are issued in the Autumn 2023, otherwise they will start looking for other opportunities. Other staff are part of research software engineering pools at university and will be redeployed to other projects if funding is not confirmed;
• The work conducted during Phase-1 can be extended and continued to achieve further deliverables;
• The initial SoI submitted to Science Board in 2020 proposed a larger project to be developed at the end of the first phase. A vision document for this Phase-2 was sent to STFC, and a full proposal is being developed;
• SWIFT-HEP started as a community-led project with a group of “conveners” that defined the scope of the project. While we aim to maintain the community aspect of the project, we will also use the next year to define a project delivery board that will be in charge of the project delivery in Phase 1.5 and Phase 2.