Unified Software Development and Analysis Environment for MPD Experiment at NICA Collider

Abstract

MPDRoot is an off-line software framework for simulation, reconstruction, and physical analyses of the simulated or experimental data for MPD experiment at NICA collider. The experiment is projected to run for a few decades and to obtain ~ 108 events of heavy ion collisions for physics analysis. Hence, provided software must be sufficiently flexible, resilient, robust to be used, developed, and maintainable for the full lifetime of the experiment and the analysis of its data. In this paper, we describe the effective and efficient implementation of build automatization, configuration, and installation of the software (DevOps) for the development and use of the MPDRoot, playing crucial role for the success of the whole MPD project in the future. Compared to previously existing state, the major improvement requirements were to reduce the complexity and to increase the universality of these deployment related actions for various system and hardware configurations. We show how this was achieved by the use of containers to deploy unified development and user environment with CernVM-FS service to dynamically load built modularized software from CernVM-FS server located in existing JINR infrastructure. Typical MPDRoot DevOps operations, being before heavy, cumbersome, and time-consuming, are now scaled down to running few commands accompanied by short deployment guide, significantly reducing possibility of errors on end-user and developer side. Above all, the main benefit of the current implementation is its wide compatibility and full modularization, making it easy to maintain, upgrade, and to identify the source of potential issues in the future.

Keywords

• nica
• mpd
• mpdroot
• devops
• cern vm-fs
• docker
• alibuild