In 2004 at the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) combined test beam, one slice of the ATLAS barrel detector (including an Inner Detector set-up and the Liquid Argon calorimeter) was exposed to particles from the H8 SPS beam line at CERN. It was the first occasion to test the combined electron performance of ATLAS. This paper presents results obtained for the momentum measurement p with the Inner Detector and for the performance of the electron measurement with the LAr calorimeter (energy E linearity and resolution) in the presence of a magnetic field in the Inner Detector for momenta ranging from 20 GeV/c to 100 GeV/c. Furthermore the particle identification capabilities of the Transition Radiation Tracker, Bremsstrahlungs-recovery algorithms relying on the LAr calorimeter and results obtained for the E/p ratio and a way how to extract scale parameters will be discussed.

A fully instrumented slice of the ATLAS detector was exposed to test beams from the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) at CERN in 2004. In this paper, the results of the measurements of the response of the barrel calorimeter to hadrons with energies in the range 20–350GeV and beam impact points and angles corresponding to pseudo-rapidity values in the range 0.2–0.65 are reported. The results are compared to the predictions of a simulation program using the Geant 4 toolkit.

The DAQ/HLT system of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, Switzerland, is being commissioned for first collisions in 2009. Presently, the system is composed of an already very large farm of computers that accounts for about one-third of its final event processing capacity. Event selection is conducted in two steps after the hardware-based Level-1 Trigger: a Level-2 Trigger processes detector data based on regions of interest (RoI) and an Event Filter operates on the full event data assembled by the Event Building system. The detector read out is fully commissioned and can be operated at its full design capacity. This places the responsibility on the High-Level Triggers system to select only events of highest physics interest that will finally reach the offline reconstruction farms. This paper brings an overview of the current ATLAS DAQ/HLT implementation and performance based on studies originated from its operation with simulated, cosmic particles and first-beam data. Its built-in event processing parallelism is presented and discussed.

A fully instrumented slice of the ATLAS central detector was exposed to test beams from the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) at CERN in 2004. In this paper, the response of the central calorimeters to pions with energies in the range between 3 and 9 GeV is presented. The linearity and the resolution of the combined calorimetry (electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters) was measured and compared to the prediction of a detector simulation program using the toolkit Geant 4.

The ATLAS experiment under construction at CERN is due to begin operation at the end of 2007. The detector will record the results of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. The trigger is a three-tier system designed to identify in real-time potentially interesting events that are then saved for detailed offline analysis. The trigger system will select approximately 200 Hz of potentially interesting events out of the 40 MHz bunch-crossing rate (with 109 interactions per second at the nominal luminosity).

This paper describes challenging requirements on the configuration service for the ATLAS experiment at CERN. It presents the status of the implementation and testing one year before the start of data taking, providing details of: 1. the capabilities of the underlying OKS object manager to store and to archive configuration descriptions, its user and programming interfaces; 2. the organization of configuration descriptions for different types of data taking runs and combinations of participating sub-detectors; 3. the scalable architecture to support simultaneous access to the service by thousands of processes during the online configuration stage of ATLAS; 4. the experience with the usage of the configuration service during large scale tests, test beam, commissioning and technical runs. The paper also presents pro and contra of the chosen object-oriented implementation compared with solutions based on pure relational database technologies, and explains why after several years of usage we continue with our approach.

During 2006 and spring 2007, integration and commissioning of trigger and data acquisition (TDAQ) equipment in the ATLAS experimental area has progressed. Much of the work has focused on a final prototype setup consisting of around eighty computers representing a subset of the full TDAQ system. There have been a series of technical runs using this setup. Various tests have been run including ones where around 6k Level-1 pre-selected simulated proton-proton events have been processed in a loop mode through the trigger and dataflow chains. The system included the readout buffers containing the events, event building, second level and third level trigger algorithms. Quantities critical for the final system, such as event processing times, have been studied using different trigger algorithms as well as different dataflow components.

In order to meet the requirements of ATLAS experiment data taking, the Trigger-DAQ (TDAQ) system is composed of O(10000) of applications running on more than 2600 computers in a network. With such a system size, software and hardware failures are quite frequent. To minimize system downtime, the Trigger-DAQ control system shall include advance verification and diagnostics facilities. The operator shall use tests and expertise of the TDAQ and detectors developers in order to diagnose and recover from errors, if possible automatically.The TDAQ control system is built as a distributed tree of controllers, where the behavior of each controller is defined in a rule-based language allowing easy customization. The control system also includes a verification framework which allows users to develop and configure tests for any component in the system with different levels of complexity. It can be used as a stand-alone test facility for a small detector installation, as part of the general TDAQ initialization procedure, and for diagnosing problems which may occur during run time.The system is currently being used in TDAQ commissioning at the ATLAS experimental zone and by subdetectors for stand-alone verification of the detector hardware before it is finally installed.

In the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, the output of readout hardware specific to each subdetector will be transmitted to buffers, located on custom made PCI cards ("ROBINs"). The data consist of fragments of events accepted by the first-level trigger at a maximum rate of 100 kHz. Groups of four ROBINs will be hosted in about 150 read-out subsystem (ROS) PCs. Event data are forwarded on request via Gigabit Ethernet links and switches to the second-level trigger or to the event builder. In this paper a discussion of the functionality and real-time properties of the ROS is combined with a presentation of measurement and modeling results for a testbed with a size of about 20% of the final DAQ system. Experimental results on strategies for optimizing the system performance, such as utilization of different network architectures and network transfer protocols, are presented for the testbed, together with extrapolations to the full system

The ATLAS collaboration at CERN operated a combined test beam (CTB) from May until November 2004. The prototype of ATLAS data acquisition system (DAQ) was used to integrate other subsystems into a common CTB setup. Data were collected synchronously from all the ATLAS detectors, which represented nine different detector technologies. Electronics and software of the first level trigger were used to trigger the setup. Event selection algorithms of the high level trigger were integrated with the system and were tested with real detector data. The possibility to operate a remote Event Filter farm synchronized with the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition System (TDAQ) was also tested. Event data, as well as detector conditions data, were made available for offline analysis.

In the Trigger and Data AcQuisition (TDAQ) system for the ATLAS project authorization of users will be an important task. The main goal of the authorization will be to reduce the chance of potentially dangerous actions being made by mistake. An Access Management (AM) component is being developed within the TDAQ to handle these issues. This paper presents the design and implementation of the component. It also describes the authorization model used and how authorization data is stored and administrated for the system.