C. Bormann et al., A SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENT FOR THE NA49 TPCS, Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment, 374(2), 1996, pp. 227-234
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.