AliECS: A New Experiment Control System for the Alice Experiment

The ALICE Experiment at CERN LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is undertaking during Long Shutdown 2 in 2019-2020 a major upgrade, which includes a new computing system called O² (Online-Offline). To ensure the efficient operation of the upgraded experiment along with its newly designed computing system, a reliable, high performance and automated experiment control system is being developed with the goal of managing all O² synchronous processing software, and of handling the data taking activity by interacting with the detectors, the trigger system and the LHC. The ALICE Experiment Control System (AliECS) is a distributed system based on state of the art cluster management and microservices which have recently emerged in the distributed computing ecosystem. Such technologies will allow the ALICE collaboration to benefit from a vibrant and innovating open source community. This communication illustrates the AliECS architecture. It provides an in-depth overview of the system’s components, features and design elements, as well as its performance. It also reports on the experience with AliECS as part of ALICE Run 3 detector commissioning setups.