Software release build process and components in ATLAS offline - proceedings for CHEP2010

ATLAS is one of the largest collaborations in the physical sciences and involves 3000 scientists and engineers from 174 institutions in 38 countries. The geographically dispersed developer community has produced a large amount of software which is organized in 10 projects. In this presentation we discuss how the software is built on a variety of compiler and operating system combinations every night. File level and package level parallelism together with multi-core build servers are used to perform fast builds of the different platforms in several branches. We discuss the different tools involved during the software release build process and also the various mechanisms implemented to provide performance gains and error detection and retry mechanisms in order to counteract network and other instabilities that would otherwise degrade the robustness of the system. The goal is to provide high quality software built as fast as possible ready for final validation and deployment