KOTO is the J-PARC E14 experiment in Tokai, Japan, a search for the ultra-rare CP-violating decay of the long-lived neutral kaon, KL → π0νν̅, whose Standard Model rate is so small and so precisely predicted that any excess would point to new physics. The collaboration brings together about fifty researchers from ten institutions in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States. The University of Chicago group is led by Yau Wah, who has worked on rare kaon decays for three decades and is the Lab’s local partner for KOTO computing.
Through our role in the Open Science Grid and the NSF PATh project, MANIAC Lab has given the KOTO group a path from the campus to national-scale high-throughput computing. We provided and supported a collaboration access point for submitting work to the OSG Open Science Pool, a 75 TB allocation on our Tempest storage with per-user scratch space, access to the UChicago gateways of the Open Science Data Federation, and a Harbor container registry whose KOTO images are distributed to every pool site over CVMFS. Our staff helped containerize the KOTO simulation and analysis software, tested and orchestrated the workflows on the pool, supported the group’s researchers day to day, and coordinated with the computing staff at KEKCC, the collaboration’s primary computing and storage center in Japan.
More recently we have worked with Wah’s group and the UChicago Research Computing Center to bring KOTO onto SHARED, the campus research storage platform, alongside XENON and the South Pole Telescope, so that its data has a home on campus with a path to the wider grid. KOTO is one of the mid-scale collaborations whose needs shape how we design facilities for groups that are far smaller than the LHC experiments but no less data-intensive.
Learn more at koto.kek.jp.
