Given the extremely high output rate foreseen at LHC and the general-purpose
nature of ATLAS experiment, an efficient and flexible way to select events in
the High Level Trigger is needed. An extremely flexible solution is proposed
that allows for early rejection of unwanted events and an easily configurable
way to choose algorithms and to specify the criteria for trigger decisions. It
is implemented in the standard ATLAS object-oriented software framework,
Athena. The early rejection is achieved by breaking the decision process down
into sequential steps. The configuration of each step defines sequences of
algorithms which should be used to process the data, and 'trigger menus' that
define which physics signatures must be satisfied to continue on to the next
step, and ultimately to accept the event. A navigation system has been built on
top of the standard Athena transient store (StoreGate) to link the event data
together in a tree-like structure. This is fundamental to the seeding
mechanism, by which data from one step is presented to the next. The design
makes it straightforward to utilize existing off-line reconstruction data
classes and algorithms when they are suitableComment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics
(CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 8 pages, PDF, PSN TUGT00