Overview ARDA Twiki Old pages:  ARDA/gLite Middleware Activity Workshops Savannah Portal Reviews Documents Team For Students Internal

ARDA - A Realisation of Distributed Analysis for LHC

In response to the recommendations of the report (pdf) of the ARDA RTAG of last November, the Project Execution Board (management board) of the LCG Project has agreed on the goals and organisation of a project to coordinate the different activities that are needed to prototype distributed analysis systems for the LHC experiments using a grid. This takes into account the discussion at the ARDA workshop held at CERN on 21-22 January, and further input and advice from the community.

A high-level description of the project, with an outline of the objectives, deliverables and organisation, is available on the web (pdf). 

The first practical outcome of the project will be four prototype analysis systems, one for each experiment, integrating middleware with common HEP tools and the analysis software of the experiments. An essential goal of the project will be the validation of these systems including users from the experiments: end-to-end prototyping going beyond mere demonstrations. The prototyping phase should evolve within a limited time into distributed analysis services: with enhanced middleware and applications software suitable for sustainable distributed analysis services for the four experiments deployed at Regional Centres.

The main participants in the project are:

• The basic middleware development team. This a joint European-US team, managed as part of the EGEE project, but including participation of the VDT leadership.
• At least one team in each experiment, that undertakes to take part in adapting/developing the analysis system of their experiment to use the basic middleware - in other words to implement instances of the HEPCAL 2 use cases.
• Providers of common HEP tools, such as POOL, SEAL, ROOT, GANGA and PROOF. Other tool providers are encouraged to participate.
• Users within experiments that will exploit the evolving distributed analysis systems and provide immediate feedback to the developers.
• Service providers from regional centres who will be involved in deploying early versions of the middleware and analysis systems.
• The participation of teams from other sciences, such as those participating in EGEE, is welcomed.

The ARDA Technical Forum, chaired by the ARDA Project Leader, will bring together all of the participants. As far as possible the common decisions needed to enable the participants to work together (specifications, targets, priorities, timescales, ..) will be made by consensus in the forum. The project has the status of an LCG project “area”, with the project leader an ex officio member of the PEB.

The ARDA Project Leader is Massimo Lamanna. Each experiment has appointed one person to coordinate their activity in the project:

• ALICE: Piergiorgio Cerello
• ATLAS: Dietrich Liko
• CMS: Stefano Belforte
• LHCb: Ulrik Egede