Real-time conditions data distribution for the Online data processing of the ALICE experiment

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is a heavy-ion detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring. It is designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma forms. The new ALICE synchronous data reconstruction facility for Run 3 needs a real-time conditions and calibration data distribution mechanism. New calibration objects are produced at up to 50Hz and have to be propagated to about 2000 servers. For efficient data distribution in this environment a network multicast delivery mechanism has to be used. There will be two sides to be implemented for this project: a library to send the newly produced objects and a caching service to run on each of the 2000 servers to receive and keep in memory the objects, making them available to the localhost running processes via a REST API.