The commissioning of the ALICE time-of-flight detector and results from the 2008 cosmic-ray data taking

The Time-Of-Flight (TOF) detector of the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC is based on Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) capable to achieve a time resolution better than 50 ps. The TOF detector consists of about 153 000 readout channels covering a total area of about 150m2. In this paper the results of the commissioning of the full TOF are reported, including the first calibration results obtained with cosmic rays.