Software Development Infrastructure for the FAIR Experiments

The proposed project FAIR (Facility for Anti-proton and Ion Research) is an international accelerator facility of the next generation. It builds on top of the experience and technological developments already made at the existing GSI facility, and incorporate new technological concepts. The four scientific pillars of FAIR are NUSTAR (nuclear structure and astrophysics), PANDA (QCD studies with cooled beams of anti-protons), CBM (physics of hadronic matter at highest baryon densities), and APPA (atomic physics, plasma physics, and applications). The FairRoot framework used by all of the big FAIR experiments as a base for their own specific developments, provides basic functionality like IO, geometry handling etc. The challenge is to support all the different experiments with their heterogeneous requirements. Due to the limited manpower, one of the first design decisions was to (re)use as much as possible already available and tested software and to focus on the development of the framework. Beside the framework itself, the FairRoot core team also provides some software development tools. We will describe the complete set of tools in this article. The Makefiles for all projects are generated using CMake. For software testing and the corresponding quality assurance, we use CTest to generate the results and CDash as web front end. The tools are completed by subversion as source code repository and trac as tool for the complete source code management. This set of tools allows us to offer the full functionality we have for FairRoot also to the experiments based on FairRoot.