Notes from my work in the Non-Thermal Astrophysics division at MPIK.
Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication
Using a full-featured RPC framework for IPC seems like overkill when the processes run on the same machine. However, if your project anyway exposes RPCs for public APIs or would benefit from a schema-based serialisation layer it makes sense to use only one tool that combines these—also for IPC. Microservices for beginners For the FlashCam software running on the DAQ servers we converged on the following high-level architecture: Each bright box corresponds to a software process running on the DAQ server....
Compiling code for (energy) efficiency
I was elated to read last winter that the x86-64 variant of RHEL 9 will be built and optimised for a modern target—not so much because this means slightly faster execution, rather because of the more efficient use of the available resources that goes along. ...
Fast, software-based muon tagging with FlashCam
In the context of our involvement in the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), we are currently in the process of finalising the firmware of our readout system of the FlashCam cameras destined to be installed in the middle-sized CTA-South telescopes. One question that came up was whether we could somehow support the quick identification of muon rings in triggered images – and it turns out we can reduce the amount of data the server has to look at by a factor of >100 just by adding a few bits to our event headers. ...