Bookkeeping, a new logbook system for ALICE

Abstract

The ALICE experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a quark-gluon plasma is expected to be formed. After a major upgrade, the new ALICE Online-Offline computational system expects to read an estimated throughput of 3.5TB/s of raw data and store and index 900Gb/s reconstructed data. The complexity of this endeavour implies the need for a well-developed and integrated logbook platform, able to keep track of the experiment’s activities and readily provide a history state of the system. The Bookkeeping application has been developed as part of the new ALICE Online graphical interfaces suite and allows users to insert, filter, track, and search system updates. Bookkeeping plays a central role in its integration with other components, which need to either read or update the system state. Furthermore, it builds global and individual system performance statistics which in turn help improve the overall efficiency of the experiment. This paper introduces the new Bookkeeping platform, it showcases its functionalities and purpose, details the means that have been put in place to fulfil all the requirements and presents an overview of its use during the first year of ALICE Run 3 data taking.