Studies for a common selection software environment in ATLAS: from the level-2 trigger to the offline reconstruction

The ATLAS High Level Trigger's (HLT) primary function of event selection will be accomplished with a Level-2 trigger farm and an event filter (EF) farm, both running software components developed in the ATLAS offline reconstruction framework. While this approach provides a unified software framework for event selection, it poses strict requirements on offline components critical for the Level-2 trigger. A Level-2 decision in ATLAS must typically be accomplished within 10 ms and with multiple event processing in concurrent threads. To address these constraints, prototypes have been developed that incorporate elements of the ATLAS data flow, high level trigger, and offline framework software. To realize a homogeneous software environment for offline components in the HLT, the Level-2 Steering Controller was developed. With electron/gamma- and muon-selection slices it has been shown that the required performance can be reached, if the offline components used are carefully designed and optimized for the application in the HLT.