The development of the Parallel ROOT Facility, PROOF, enables a physicist to analyze and understand much larger data sets on a shorter time scale. It makes use of the inherent parallelism in event data and implements an architecture that optimizes I/O and CPU utilization in heterogeneous clusters with distributed storage. The system provides transparent and interactive access to gigabytes today. Being part of the ROOT framework PROOF inherits the benefits of a performant object storage system and a wealth of statistical and visualization tools. This paper describes the key principles of the PROOF architecture and the implementation of the system. We will illustrate its features using a simple example and present measurements of the scalability of the system. Finally we will discuss how PROOF can be interfaced and make use of the different Grid solutions.
@article{arxiv.physics/0306110,
title = {The PROOF Distributed Parallel Analysis Framework based on ROOT},
author = {Maarten Ballintijn and Rene Brun and Fons Rademakers and Gunther Roland},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0306110},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, CA, USA, March 2003, 5 pages, LaTeX, 4 eps figures. PSN TULT003