Design and development of software tools for INO

Particle Physics Experiments offer wide scope for software design and development. Be it simulations, data acquisition systems and statistical analysis, software plays a very crucial role in achieving the goals of an experiment. There exists today a variety of freeware tools for text editing, GUI layout, project management, context sensitive help, visual debugging and rapid code navigation which could bring down the product development time by orders of magnitude.

The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), a mega-science project of our nation, aims to study neutrino oscillations using a 50 kiloton Iron Calorimeter with (ICAL) about 30,000 Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) as active detector elements and around 3.6 million electronic channels. A prototype has already been built and working at TIFR. The TIFR-INO group has developed a range of customized applications for simulations, data acquisition and data analysis, in the process of which we have gained an expertise in developing and designing software tools for a modern large scale experiment. No commercial products were used in the development of our software applications.

I will explain the tools that we have used for our software development, the programming models that we have used and an overview of the tools that we have developed.