Modularization of the LHCb software environment and preparation for heterogeneous resources

Abstract

LHCb software runs in very different computing environments: the trigger farm at CERN, on the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), on shared clusters or on software developer’s desktops. . . The old model assumes the availability of CVMFS and relies on custom scripts (a.k.a LbScripts) to configure the environment to build and run the software. It lacks flexibility and does not allow, for example running in container and it is very difficult to extend them to configure and run on new environments. This paper describes the steps taken to modularize those tools to allow for easier development and deployment (as standard Python packages), but also added integration with container technology to better support non standard environments.