A central component of the ATLAS operation, the TDAQ software calls fast-operating reconstruction and selection algorithms in the Athena framework to decide which of the 30 million proton-bunch crossings occurring in the ATLAS detector every second should be kept. It is under this same framework that the ATLAS Collaboration has released its TDAQ software (available here). “This is the licence recommended by the High-Energy Physics Software Foundation (HSF) to support ever-more open science in the field.” “It is our conviction that, wherever possible, publicly-funded software should be made openly accessible,” adds Moyse. “Its release helps broaden our collaboration beyond groups involved in particle physics research – and also allows ATLAS students and postdocs to showcase their work to external employers, hopefully boosting their future careers.”Īthena was released under the Apache 2.0 licence, a permissive licence that allows for modifications, reuse and citation.
“Athena contains some 5 million lines of code in C++ and Python, and was developed by hundreds of collaborators,” says Edward Moyse, ATLAS Software Coordinator from the University of Massachusetts. Athena (available here) is a collision-event processing software used by the experiment for event reconstruction, detector simulation, and other key tasks required for data analysis and the extraction of physics results. With this new release, most ATLAS software is now open – reinforcing the Collaboration’s ongoing commitment to open science.ĪTLAS' first major step into open software was the release of Athena at the end of 2018. The ATLAS Collaboration has just released a collection of 200 software packages that make up the Trigger and Data Acquisition System (TDAQ).