Can we re-use AMANDA software?
AMANDA software has served the collaboration well. Calibration, reconstruction and simulation procedures have been developed which are needed for IceCube.
Fast prototyping has reduced development time substantially.
Reconstruction program is extremely flexible and important methods are abstracted so that bugs fixed for one routine are fixed for all routines.
AMANDA software suffers from lack of funding & entrepreneurial contributions.
Things that complicate re-use:
- The current system is a series of individual programs linked together with scripts and vigilant operators. IceCube solution is to automate many tasks.
- Currently, different subsystems do not share common interfaces or algorithms, even where activities are purported to be identical. IceCube will be far more reliable and easier to maintain if bugs can be fixed in a single location.
- The Siegmund repository holds the largest subset of the code. The I/O in this library is 4X slower than the I/O in the other libraries. IceCube will need a faster/more flexible event model.
- Many algorithms use global (extern) variables to pass information to low level routines. This prevents two types of reconstruction being linked in the same executable. To optimize I/O and insure that all reconstructions and filters act on the same event