BABAR’s Experience with the Preservation of Data and Analysis Capabilities

The BABAR experiment collected electron-positron collisions at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) from 1999-2008. Although data taking has stopped 15 years ago, the collaboration is still actively doing data analyses, publishing results, and giving presentations at international conferences. Special considerations were needed to do analyses using a computing environment that was developed decades ago. A framework is required that preserves the data, data access, and the capability of doing analyses using a well defined and preserved environment. Also, BABAR’s support by SLAC ended at the beginning of 2021. Fortunately, the High Energy Physics Research Computing group at the University of Victoria (UVic), Canada, offered to provide the new home for the main BABAR computing infrastructure, the Grid Computing Centre Karlsruhe offered to host all data for access by analyses running at UVic, and CERN and the IN2P3 Computing Centre offered to store a backup of all data. This paper presents what was done at BABAR to preserve the data and analysis capabilities and what was needed to move the whole computing infrastructure, including collaboration tools and data files, away from SLAC. It will be shown how BABAR preserved the ability to continue to do data analyses and also have a working collaboration tools infrastructure. This paper will describe on BABAR’s experience with such a big change in its infrastructure and what was learned from it, which may be useful to other experiments which are interested in long term analysis support and data preservation in general.