The analysis infrastructure is designed, constructed and maintained by three working groups, each led by its own Working Group Coordinator (WGC). The coordinators are responsible for ensuring that his/her group's responsibilities are fulfilled and for maintaining communications with one another and with the Analysis Coordinator. These working groups are as follows:
Given the vital importance of these tasks, both for performing viable analyses and for engendering a deep understanding of the IceCube detector, the associated workload is shared across the collaboration, and each institution is obliged to contribute manpower to one or more of these groups.
The responsibility of this group is to collect, validate and install all detector-related constants needed for data analysis, and to continuously measure and help maintain data quality. This work includes, for example, the generation of detector geometry constants, measurement of ice parameters, and studies of detector response using in situ light sources, followed by installation of the resulting constants into the database. This work also includes the measurement and analysis of quantities which track and improve data quality, such as the number of hot or dead PMTs, PMT noise rates, possible drifts in various online calibrations, and checks of overall data quality using downgoing muons.
Much of the output of this group is in the form of entries to the database. This database, described in sec. 8.1.5, is accessed by both the reconstruction and the simulation codes, and this group provides the appropriate software to make such access straightforward.
The simulation working group is responsible for writing, supporting and documenting all required simulation programs. The group develops the software which simulates the response of the detector to charged particles emitting Cerenkov light, including but not limited to the simulation of ice parameters, photons passing through the ice, the PMT response, the DOM electronics, and the trigger. The simulation package is compared to data whenever possible to ensure that it is as close an approximation to reality as possible. This group also provides Monte Carlo generators for the basic science topics covered by the Physics Working Groups (see below).
The reconstruction working group is responsible for writing, supporting and documenting the reconstruction programs for single muon tracks, multimuons, cascades, taus, contained events and the energy reconstruction. The reconstruction programs are created within the software framework provided by the Data Handling group.
