Speaker
L. Nellen
(I. DE CIENCIAS NUCLEARES, UNAM)
Description
The Pierre Auger Observatory is designed to unveil the nature and the
origin of the highest energy cosmic rays. Two sites, one currently
under construction in Argentina, and another pending in the Northern
hemisphere, will observe extensive air showers using a hybrid detector
comprising a ground array of 1600 water Cerenkov tanks overlooked by
four atmospheric fluorescence detectors. Though the computing demands
of the experiment are less severe than those of traditional high
energy physics experiments in terms of data volume and detector
complexity, the large geographically dispersed collaboration and the
heterogeneous set of simulation and reconstruction requirements
confronts the offline software with some special challenges.
We have designed and implemented a framework to allow collaborators to
contribute algorithms and sequencing instructions to build up the
variety of applications they require. The framework includes
machinery to manage these user codes, to organize the abundance of
user-contributed configuration files, to facilitate multi-format file
handling, and to provide access to event and time-dependent detector
information which can reside in various data sources. A number of
utilities are also provided, including a novel geometry package which
allows manipulation of abstract geometrical objects independent of
coordinate system choice. The framework is implemented in C++, follows
an object oriented paradigm, and takes advantage of some of the more
widespread tools that the open source community offers, while keeping
the user-side simple enough for C++ non-experts to learn in a
reasonable time. The distribution system includes unit and acceptance
testing in order to support rapid development of both the core
framework and contributed user code. Great attention has been paid to
the ease of installation.
Authors
L. Nellen
(I. DE CIENCIAS NUCLEARES, UNAM)
L. Prado Jr
(State University of Campinas)
S. Argiro
(University of Torino)
T. Paul
(Northeastern University)
T. Porter
(Louisiana State University)
