Speaker
T. DeYoung
(UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND)
Description
IceCube is a cubic kilometer-scale neutrino telescope under construction at the South
Pole. The minimalistic nature of the instrument poses several challenges for the
software framework. Events occur at random times, and frequently overlap, requiring
some modifications of the standard event-based processing paradigm. Computational
requirements related to modeling the detector medium necessitate the ability for
software components to defer processing events. With minimal information from the
detector, events must be reconstructed many times with different hypotheses or
methods, and the results compared. The appropriate series of software components
required to process an event varies considerably, and can be determined only at run
time. Finally, reconstruction algorithms are constantly evolving, with development
taking place throughout the collaboration, so it is essential that conversion of
private analysis code to online production software be simple and, given the
inaccessibility of the experimental site, robust. The IceCube collaboration has
developed the IceTray framework, which meets these needs by blending aspects of push-
and pull-based architectures to produce a highly modular system which nevertheless
allows each software component a significant degree of control over the execution flow.
Author
T. DeYoung
(UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND)
