An improved infrastructure for the IceCube realtime system

TL;DR

This paper describes enhancements to the IceCube realtime alert system, improving internal data handling, event distribution, and long-term storage to support rapid neutrino event alerts for the scientific community.

Contribution

It introduces an improved infrastructure for the IceCube realtime system, optimizing event processing, distribution, and storage following FAIR principles.

Findings

Streamlined internal handling of neutrino events.

Enhanced distribution to alert networks.

Implementation of FAIR-compliant storage system.

Abstract

The IceCube realtime alert system has been operating since 2016. It provides prompt alerts on high-energy neutrino events to the astroparticle physics community. The localization regions for the incoming direction of neutrinos are published through NASA's Gamma-ray Coordinate Network (GCN). The IceCube realtime system consists of infrastructure dedicated to the selection of alert events, the reconstruction of their topology and arrival direction, the calculation of directional uncertainty contours and the distribution of the event information through public alert networks. Using a message-based workflow management system, a dedicated software (SkyDriver) provides a representational state transfer (REST) interface to parallelized reconstruction algorithms. In this contribution, we outline the improvements of the internal infrastructure of the IceCube realtime system that aims to streamline the internal handling of neutrino events, their distribution to the SkyDriver interface, the collection of the reconstruction results as well as their conversion into human- and machine-readable alerts to be publicly distributed through different alert networks. An approach for the long-term storage and cataloging of alert events according to findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR) principles is outlined.