About LArSoft

The LArSoft collaboration consists of a group of experiments and software computing organizations contributing and sharing data simulation, processing and analysis code for Liquid Argon TPC experiments. Membership expectations can be found here. The work of the collaboration is carried out by the LArSoft core project which is governed by a steering group. The LArSoft Steering Group includes the experiment spokespersons and leads of Fermilab organizations involved in the collaboration. You can read about this group and several other groups important to the LArSoft Collaboration here.

The LArSoft core project provides:

  • build and release of the common framework, based on the art event processing framework
  • support for each experiment to build and release their own executables
  • coordination for work across the participants: between the experiments, with the art software  team, with other experiment specific framework teams.
  • a centralized forum for bug fixes, documentation, a continuous integration framework for regression and release testing,  and other user support as well as classes and workshops

The current LArSoft eco-system needs to evolve to provide the capabilities, complexity and scaling needed to support LArTPC based collaborative science over the next decade. Automated reconstruction and analysis of large and complex liquid argon based detectors is challenging. Algorithms, frameworks, platforms, applications and resources will need to be usable across diverse resources and diverse detectors. There is also a dynamically changing pool of developers and users. Further challenges to the eco-system are the changes in technologies and scale of use. LArSoft must be open to new scientific hypotheses and innovative approaches. LArSoft benefits from a collaborative approach across the experiments.

The LArSoft team supported by Fermilab is being staffed by people from the SciSoft team. LArSoft works closely with other projects within Fermilab as well as the experiments.

Work areas are tracked as redmine issues.

A glossary of relevant terms and roles was published from the Requirements workshop where the physics, functional, and output requirements of software, computing, and processes for event simulation, reconstruction and analysis for  experiments using LAr TPCs was gathered.