AliECS: a New Experiment Control System for the ALICE Experiment

The ALICE Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is undertaking a major upgrade during LHC Long Shutdown 2 in 2019-2021, which includes a new computing system called O2 (Online-Offline). To ensure the efficient operation of the upgraded experiment and of its newly designed computing system, a reliable, high performance, and automated experiment control system is being developed. The ALICE Experiment Control System (AliECS) is a distributed system based on state of the art cluster management and microservices that have recently emerged in the distributed computing ecosystem. Such technologies will allow the ALICE collaboration to benefit from a vibrant and innovating open source community. This communication describes the AliECS architecture. It provides an in-depth overview of the system’s components, features, and design elements, as well as its performance. It also reports on the experience with AliECS as part of ALICE Run 3 detector commissioning setups.