4–8 Nov 2019
Adelaide Convention Centre
Australia/Adelaide timezone

ALFA: A framework for building distributed applications

4 Nov 2019, 11:30
15m
Riverbank R2 (Adelaide Convention Centre)

Riverbank R2

Adelaide Convention Centre

Oral Track 5 – Software Development Track 5 – Software Development

Speaker

Mohammad Al-Turany (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE))

Description

The ALFA framework is a joint development between ALICE Online-Offline and FairRoot teams. ALFA has a distributed architecture, i.e. a collection of highly maintainable, testable, loosely coupled, independently deployable processes.

ALFA allows the developer to focus on building single-function modules with well-defined interfaces and operations. The communication between the independent processes is handled by FairMQ transport layer. FairMQ offers multiple implementations of its abstract data transport interface, it integrates some popular data transport technologies like ZeroMQ and nanomsg. But also provides shared memory and RDMA transport (based on libfabric) for high throughput, low latency applications. Moreover, FairMQ allows the single process to use multiple and different transports at the same time.

FairMQ based processes can be controlled and orchestrated via different systems by implementing the corresponding plugin. However, ALFA delivers also the Dynamic Deployment System (DDS) as an independent set of utilities and interfaces, providing a dynamic distribution of different user processes on any Resource Management System (RMS) or a laptop.

ALFA is already being tested and used by different experiments in different stages of data processing as it offers an easy integration of heterogeneous hardware and software. Examples of ALFA usage in different stages of event processing will be presented; in a detector read-out as well as in an online reconstruction and in a pure offline world of detector simulations.

Consider for promotion Yes

Primary author

Mohammad Al-Turany (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE))

Co-authors

Alexey Rybalchenko (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE)) Dennis Klein (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE)) Matthias Kretz (Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Univ. (DE)) Dmytro Kresan (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE)) Radoslaw Karabowicz (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE)) Andrey Lebedev (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE)) Anar Manafov (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE)) Thorsten Kollegger (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE)) Florian Uhlig (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE))

Presentation materials