The Scikit HEP Project overview and prospects

Eduardo Rodrigues,Dmitri Smirnov,Hans Dembinski,Pratyush Das,Henry Schreiner,Jim Pivarski,Matthieu Marinangeli,Jaydeep Nandi,Nick Smith,Matthew Feickert,Benjamin Krikler,Chris Burr

doi:10.1051/epjconf/202024506028

Abstract

Scikit-HEP is a community-driven and community-oriented project with the goal of providing an ecosystem for particle physics data analysis in Python. Scikit-HEP is a toolset of approximately twenty packages and a few “affiliated” packages. It expands the typical Python data analysis tools for particle physicists. Each package focuses on a particular topic, and interacts with other packages in the toolset, where appropriate. Most of the packages are easy to install in many environments; much work has been done this year to provide binary “wheels” on PyPI and conda-forge packages. The Scikit-HEP project has been gaining interest and momentum, by building a user and developer community engaging collaboration across experiments. Some of the packages are being used by other communities, including the astroparticle physics community. An overview of the overall project and toolset will be presented, as well as a vision for development and sustainability.

Highlights

Python is an ever more popular programming language across a broad range of communities, notably in Data Science
Outside High Energy Physics (HEP), the Python scientific ecosystem is built atop the "building blocks" of the SciPy ecosystem of open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering [1]
We are proud to mention that several collider (Belle II, CMS) and non-collider (KM3NeT) experiments officially use some of Scikit-HEP in their external dependencies, as do other software projects (Coffea, zfit)

Summary

Scikit-HEP project overview

The Scikit-HEP project [6] is a community-driven and community-oriented effort with the aim of providing Particle Physics at large with a toolset ecosystem for data analysis in Python. It does not attempt in any way to provide a replacement for the Python ecosystem based on the SciPy suite; it rather builds on its foundational libraries providing core and common tools for the HEP community. Some of the packages found in the GitHub organisation, such as the well-known packages root_numpy [7] and root_pandas [8], pre-dating the project, are not described in this report. The remainder of this report provides a whirlwind tour of the main packages

Whirlwind tour of Scikit-HEP packages

Outlook