21–25 May 2012
New York City, NY, USA
US/Eastern timezone

Orthos, an alarm system for the ALICE DAQ operations

24 May 2012, 13:30
4h 45m
Rosenthal Pavilion (10th floor) (Kimmel Center)

Rosenthal Pavilion (10th floor)

Kimmel Center

Poster Online Computing (track 1) Poster Session

Speaker

Sylvain Chapeland (CERN)

Description

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the heavy-ion detector studying the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma at the CERN LHC (Large Hadron Collider). The DAQ (Data Acquisition System) facilities handle the data flow from the detectors electronics up to the mass storage. The DAQ system is based on a large farm of commodity hardware consisting of more than 600 devices (Linux PCs, storage, network switches), and controls hundreds of distributed hardware and software components interacting together. This paper presents Orthos, the alarm system used to detect, log, report, and follow-up abnormal situations on the DAQ machines at the experimental area. The main objective of this package is to integrate alarm detection and notification mechanisms with a full-featured issues tracker, in order to prioritize, assign, and fix system failures optimally. This tool relies on a database repository with a logic engine, SQL interfaces to inject or query metrics, and dynamic web pages for user interaction. We describe the system architecture, the technologies used for the implementation, and the integration with existing monitoring tools.

Primary author

Co-authors

Adriana Telesca (CERN) Alexandru Grigore (Polytechnic University of Bucharest (RO)) Mr Barthelemy von Haller (CERN) Mr Bartolomeu Andre Rodrigues Fernandes Rabacal (Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST)) Csaba Soos (CERN) Ervin Denes (Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HU)) Filippo Costa (CERN) Mr Franco Carena (CERN) Giuseppe Simonetti (Universita e INFN (IT)) Mr Pierre Vande Vyvre (CERN) Roberto Divia (CERN) Ulrich Fuchs (CERN) Mr Vasco Chibante Barroso (CERN) Wisla Carena (CERN)

Presentation materials