hundreds of these PC's into a large DAQ fabric. The software framework of the ALICE DAQ is called DATE (ALICE Data Acquisition and Test Environment). DATE is already in use today, during the construction and testing phase of the experiment, while evolving gradually towards the final production system. Moreover, AFFAIR (A Flexible Fabric and Application Information Recorder) is the performance monitoring software developed by the ALICE Data Acquisition project. AFFAIR is largely based on open source code and is composed of the following components: data gathering, inter-node communication employing DIM, fast and temporary round robin database storage, and permanent storage and plot generation using ROOT. Finally. the ALICE experiment Mass Storage System (MSS) combines a very high bandwidth (1.25 GByte/s) and every year stores huge amounts of data, more than 1 Pbytes. The mass storage system is made of: a) Global Data Storage (GDS) performing the temporary storage of data at the experimental pit; b) Permanent Data Storage (PDS) for long-term archive of data in the CERN Computing Center and finally from The Mass Storage System software managing the creation, the access and the archive of data. Results The physics programme of ALICE includes the following main topics: i) the study of the thermalization of partons in the QGP with focus on the massive charming beauty quarks and understanding the behaviour of these heavy quarks in relation to the strongly coupled medium of QGP, ii) the study of the mechanisms of energy loss that occur in the medium and the dependencies of energy loss on the parton species, iii) the dissociation of quarkonium states which can be a probe of deconfinement and of the temperature of the medium and finally the production of thermal photons and low-mass dileptons emitted by the QGP which is about assessing the initial temperature and degrees of freedom of the systems as well as the chiral nature of the phase transition. The ALICE collaboration presented its first results from LHC proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV in March 2010. The results confirmed that the charged-particle multiplicity is rising with energy faster than expected while the shape of the multiplicity distribution is not reproduced well by standard simulations. The results were based on the analysis of a sample of 300,000 proton–proton collisions the ALICE experiment collected during the first runs of the LHC with stable beams at a centre-of-mass energy, √s, of 7