Verification of the ALICE Inner Tracking System readout chain
The ALICE Inner Tracking System (ITS) team at CERN has completed commissioning the ITS2 detector, related electronic systems, and data-taking for physics has started. With higher rates and Pb-Pb collisions, increased data rates and radiation effects are expected to challenge the system’s stability. The ALICE ITS upgrade project includes a new complex readout system that interfaces several other complex systems, and debugging the readout chain is challenging. This project consists of a requirement specification, technical analysis, and acceptance test from which a command-line utility named fastPASTA has been developed as a final product to verify readout protocols and inspect raw data to debug failures in the readout system. The project is exploratory in assessing the Rust programming language and ecosystem’s impact on developing performant and reusable software. Source code and documentation are available at the GitLab repository [1].