  During the upcoming Runs 3 and 4 of the LHC, ALICE will take data at a peak
Pb-Pb collision rate of 50 kHz. This will be made possible thanks to the
upgrade of the main tracking detectors of the experiment, and with a new data
processing strategy. In order to collect the statistics needed for the precise
measurements that ALICE aims at, a continuous readout will be adopted. This
brings about the challenge of handling unprecedented data rates. The ~3.5 TB/s
of raw data from the detectors will be reduced to about 600 GB/s on the First
Level Processing (FLP) nodes, and sent to the Event Processing layer for
further processing and reduction to less than 100 GB/s of data to be stored
permanently. This synchronous processing stage, which will include
reconstruction, calibration and compression procedures, will be followed by an
asynchronous one to account for final calibrations. Quality Control (QC) will
be intensively used in all the processing stages. This talk illustrates the
processing flow for ALICE in Runs 3 and 4, with emphasis on the components of
the synchronous processing. The chosen software design will be described. An
overview of the data analysis framework is included as well.
