Interactive Analysis using PROOF in a GRID Infrastructure

Current high energy physics experiments aim to explore new territories where new physics is expected. In order to achieve that, a huge amount of data has to be collected and analyzed. The accomplishment of these scientific projects require computing resources beyond the capabilities of a single user or group, thus the data is treated under the grid infrastructure. Despite the reduction applied to the data, the sample used in the last step of the analysis is still large. At this phase, interactivity contributes to a faster optimization of the final cuts in order to improve the results. The Parallel ROOT Facility (PROOF) is intended to speed up even further this procedure providing the user analysis results within a shorter time by simultaneously using more cores. Taking profit of the computing resources and facilities available at Instituto de F?sica de Cantabria (IFCA), shared between two major projects LHC-CMS Tier-2 and GRID-CSIC, we have developed a setup that integrates PROOF with SGE as local resource management system and GPFS as file system, both common to the grid infrastructure. The setup was also integrated in a similar infrastructure for the LHC-CMS Tier-3 at Universidad de Oviedo that uses Torque (PBS) as local job manager and Hadoop as file system. In addition, to ease the transition from a sequential analysis code to PROOF, an analysis framework based on the TSelector class is provided. Integrating PROOF in a cluster provides users the potential usage of thousands of cores (1,680 in the IFCA case). Performance measurements have been done showing a speed improvement closely correlated with the number of cores used.