Physics software

CERN and the HEP community have a long history of collaborative development of physics applications software, and the LCG project is extending this tradition into the Grid era. The unprecedented scale and distributed nature of computing and data management at the LHC require that software in many areas be extended or newly developed, and integrated and validated in the complex software environments of the experiments. Activities include:

ROOT, a set of object-oriented core libraries and data analysis framework used by all the LHC experiments and widely used in the HEP community. It includes basic common utilities, a plug-in manager, an object dictionary, mathematical libraries, C++ and Python scripting services, a graphical user interface toolkit, facilities for statistical analysis and visualization of data, storage of complex C++ object data structures, and support for distributed analysis.

POOL, a , a data persistency framework providing petabyte-scale event data storage via a hybrid approach that combines object serialization based on ROOT I/O for bulk data storage with a transaction safe metadata component based on relational databases. The relational database backend is also used for storing and retrieving time-dependent detector conditions such as calibrations, alignments, etc. POOL integrates with Grid middleware to provide navigational access to distributed data via implementation-neutral interfaces.

Simulation for modeling particle physics experiments by applying Monte Carlo methods to the generation, propagation and the physics interactions of elementary particles passing through the detector systems. This project encompasses common work on the development of a generic simulation framework and infrastructure, CERN and LHC participation in Geant4, integration of FLUKA into the generic framework, physics validation of the simulation, and Monte Carlo event generator services.