Leveraging an open source serverless framework for high energy physics computing

Abstract

CERN (Centre Europeen pour la Recherce Nucleaire) is the largest research centre for high energy physics (HEP). It offers unique computational challenges as a result of the large amount of data generated by the large hadron collider. CERN has developed and supports a software called ROOT, which is the de facto standard for HEP data analysis. This framework offers a high-level and easy-to-use interface called RDataFrame, which allows managing and processing large data sets. In recent years, its functionality has been extended to take advantage of distributed computing capabilities. Thanks to its declarative programming model, the user-facing API can be decoupled from the actual execution backend. This decoupling allows physical analysis to scale automatically to thousands of computational cores over various types of distributed resources.