ATLAS Event Store and I/O developments in support for Production and Analysis in Run 3

¹ Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA
² Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA

^* Corresponding author: mnowak@bnl.gov
^† Copyright 2020 CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS Collaboration. Reproduction of this article or parts of it is allowed as specified in the CC-BY-4.0 license.

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

During the long LHC shutdown, ATLAS experiment is preparing several fundamental changes to its offline event processing framework and analysis model. These include moving to multi-threaded reconstruction and simulation and reducing data duplication during derivation analysis by producing a combined mini-xAOD stream. These changes will allow ATLAS to take advantage of the higher luminosity at Run 3 without overstraining processing and storage capabilities. They also require significant improvements to the underlying event store and the I/O framework to support them. These improvements include: 1) an overhaul of the Run 2 I/O framework to be thread-safe and minimize serial bottlenecks, 2) introduction of new immutable references for object navigation, which don’t rely on storage container entry number so data can be merged in-memory, 3) using filter decisions to annotate combined output stream to allow for fast event selection on input and 4) selecting optimized compression algorithms and settings to allow efficient reading of event selections.