ALFA: The new ALICE-FAIR software framework

21st International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics

物理学;计算机科学

Al-Turany, M.^1,2 ; Buncic, P.^2 ; Hristov, P.^2 ; Kollegger, T.^1 ; Kouzinopoulos, C.^2 ; Lebedev, A.^1 ; Lindenstruth, V.^1,3 ; Manafov, A.^1 ; Richter, M.^2,4 ; Rybalchenko, A.^1 ; Vyvre, P. Vande^2 ; Winckler, N.^1

GSI Helmholtzzentrum Fr Schwerionenforschung GmbH, Planckstrae 1, Darmstadt

64291, Germany^1

CERN, European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Geneve

1211-23, Switzerland^2

FIAS, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Ruth-Moufang-Strae 1, Frankfurt

60438, Germany^3

Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Norway^4

关键词: Application protocols;    Hardware and software;    Hardware platform;    Heterogeneous systems;    Horizontal scaling;    Joint development;    Limited communication;    Software frameworks;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/664/7/072001/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/664/7/072001

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

The commonalities between the ALICE and FAIR experiments and their computing requirements led to the development of large parts of a common software framework in an experiment independent way. The FairRoot project has already shown the feasibility of such an approach for the FAIR experiments and extending it beyond FAIR to experiments at other facilities[1, 2]. The ALFA framework is a joint development between ALICE Online- Offline (O2) and FairRoot teams. ALFA is designed as a flexible, elastic system, which balances reliability and ease of development with performance using multi-processing and multithreading. A message- based approach has been adopted; such an approach will support the use of the software on different hardware platforms, including heterogeneous systems. Each process in ALFA assumes limited communication and reliance on other processes. Such a design will add horizontal scaling (multiple processes) to vertical scaling provided by multiple threads to meet computing and throughput demands. ALFA does not dictate any application protocols. Potentially, any content-based processor or any source can change the application protocol. The framework supports different serialization standards for data exchange between different hardware and software languages.