Fast access to the CMS detector condition data employing HTML5 technologies

Abstract

This paper focuses on using HTML version 5 (HTML5) for accessing condition data for the CMS experiment, evaluating the benefits and risks posed by the use of this technology. According to the authors of HTML5, this technology attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and addresses the needs of web applications, an area previously not adequately covered by HTML. We demonstrate that employing HTML5 brings important benefits in terms of access performance to the CMS condition data. The combined use of web storage and web sockets allows increasing the performance and reducing the costs in term of computation power, memory usage and network bandwidth for client and server. Above all, the web workers allow creating different scripts that can be executed using multi-thread mode, exploiting multi-core microprocessors. Web workers have been employed in order to substantially decrease the web page rendering time to display the condition data stored in the CMS condition database.