The development of an LHC physics analysis involves numerous investigations that require the repeated processing of terabytes of data. Thus, a rapid completion of each of these analysis cycles is central to mastering the science project. We present a solution to efficiently handle and accelerate physics analyses on small-size institute clusters. Our solution is based on three key concepts: Vectorized processing of collision events, the "MapReduce" paradigm for scaling out on computing clusters, and efficiently utilized SSD caching to reduce latencies in IO operations. Using simulations from a Higgs pair production physics analysis as an example, we achieve an improvement factor of 6.3 in runtime after one cycle and even an overall speedup of a factor of 14.9 after 10 cycles.
@article{arxiv.2207.08598,
title = {Fast Columnar Physics Analyses of Terabyte-Scale LHC Data on a Cache-Aware Dask Cluster},
author = {Niclas Eich and Martin Erdmann and Peter Fackeldey and Benjamin Fischer and Dennis Noll and Yannik Rath},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.08598},
year = {2022}
}