BaBar Software Year 2000 Statement

• SCS Y2k page

• CERN Y2k page

The BaBar collaboration is currently developing the software required for the data acquisition, reconstruction, simulation, analysis, and storage of a dataset estimated at of order 100 Tbyte/year. The code base for this is of order 1 million lines of (mostly C++) code, besides commercial software.

It should be emphasized that BaBar does not depend on software for personnel or detector safety. Hardware interlocks are required to provide this protection. In this sense, the BaBar software is not a critical system. The remaining vulnerabilities are the potential for loss of data (either due to corruption in the course of acquisition or due to acquisition downtime) or the delay of results due to the time required to repair a problem.

The developers are well aware of the year 2000 issues. As most of the code is new, potential problems can be avoided by design. The small amount of legacy software will mostly be replaced on the time scale of year 2000, and there are no known problems.

In the event problems within BaBar-developed code are found, they will be repaired. It is expected that this will be relatively easy because:

• Most of the code is developed in house, and the development team will continue to be largely available.

• The design philosophy of the code is to hide implementation details. This permits changing implementations without requiring massive side-effect changes.

There are some areas where commercial software is used in BaBar. In general, SLAC requires certification from software vendors that the code will continue to function properly beyond year 2000. The vendor operating systems and development environments are, of course, a significant portion of this. However, because of the widespread importance of this code in the entire industry, it may be expected that Y2k problems will either be anticipated or given immediate patches by the vendors.

For example, the Solaris operating system, running on Sun Microsystems computers is currently an important platform in BaBar, and this is expected to be true through the Y2k transition. Sun certifies that the Solaris 2.6 operating system, which is currently supported by BaBar, is Y2k compliant. SLAC has incorporated this into the purchase order for the major portion of the online data acquisition Unix farm.

The most significant other commercial software packages used by BaBar are:

• The Wind River VxWorks realtime operating system, which the online data acquisition depends on. In particular, BaBar uses the Tornado product group. Because of its critical importance in the data acquisition chain, this is the package with the greatest potential to cause irrecoverable damage. Wind River certifies the Tornado product as already Y2k compliant (Y2k compliance white paper, Y2k Readiness Disclsoure).

• Transarc's Andrew File System distributed file system, which is used in the code distribution for BaBar. Transarc certifies versions of AFS later than 3.4a, build level 5.36 as Y2k compliant. SLAC is currently running a more recent build level of AFS.

• The Objectivity database software, used in storing the data, conditions, and calibrations for the experiment. Objectivity has certified Y2k compliance (point to PRODUCTS, select Y2K menu item) for its database product, and the BaBar database group has considered whether there may be problems, and concluded that our application design should not encounter difficulty at year 2000. We do store time stamps for various purposes, but 2000 is not special, and the code should work for dates well beyond the lifetime of the experiment, estimated at approximately ten years.

• The Rogue Wave Tools.h++ class library. This product does contain date manipulation facilities. Rogue Wave certifies Tools.h++ as Y2k compliant, although the current version contains a year 2037 restriction which they intend to fix in future versions.

• The HPSS hierarchical storage system from IBM. IBM certifies this product as Y2k ready (click on "Generate Software Report", search for "HPSS").

This page is maintained by Frank Porter