A SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENT FOR THE NA49 TPCS

In the collision of ultrarelativistic lead ions with nuclear targets a t the CERN SPS up to several thousand charged particles in the momentu m range of 0.1-200 GeV/c are produced. These events have been recorded by the large-volume tracking detectors (TPCs) of the experiment NA49. In order to analyse the huge amount of data (typically 10 TBytes per run) a software environment was developed at the University of Frankfu rt. This system describes the detector information, basic data types a nd their relationships as C structures. The structure management is ba sed on the dynamical memory management available in C. The implementat ion as a client-server architecture allows mixed-language programming and sharing of resources like visualization applications. Client and s erver communicate by standard UNIX network tools, thus providing inter operability between applications on different machines in heterogeneou s distributed environments.