From design to production: State-of-the-art web user interfaces to operate ALICE offline and online system

Abstract

Abstract The ALICE Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is currently undergoing a major upgrade during Long Shutdown; this entails a new Online-Offline computing system and a new set of reliable and performant graphical user interfaces. After deployment, the updated system is expected to read an estimated throughput of 27 Tb/s of raw data and index 800 of Gb/s reconstructed data. The newly developed graphical interfaces are to be used 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in the control room by the subsystem experts and on-call support staff. The interfaces are being built based on a common library developed in-house whose goal is to provide the core functionalities and building blocks, and on modern web technologies meant to ensure support for both Runs 3 and 4. This approach secures a consolidated user experience that is efficient, resilient, easy to maintain, and will bring live, straightforward control of the experiment and useful information to the collaboration. This, in turn, will help in our mission to increase the usage of the LHC beam, maximizing the recorded data and potentially leading to new discoveries. Furthermore, in order to guarantee the stability of the platforms, state-of-the-art technologies and practices were applied to build a continuous-integration and continuous-deployment environment to ensure high-quality code, faster releases, and reduced mean time to resolution. This paper provides an in-depth look at the newly developed web-based components including their features and architecture as well as the automated deployment workflow used for software quality assurance.