Speaker
Dr
Conrad Steenberg
(Caltech)
Description
We describe how we have used the Clarens Grid Portal Toolkit to develop powerful
application and browser-level interfaces to ROOT and Pythia. The Clarens Toolkit is a
codebase that was initially developed under the auspices of the Grid Analysis
Environment project at Caltech, with the goal of enabling LHC physicists engaged in
analysis to bring the full power of the Grid to their desktops, while at the same
time not altering the look, feel and interface of their chosen analysis tool. By
wrapping existing applications, and providing a well documented wrapper API, client
applications are able to exchange commands, data and results using standard protocols
such as XML-RPC, HTTP and HTTPS. In particular, we have implemented a wrapper to the
Pythia particle collision simulation code, and developed an encapsulated form of the
ROOT environment, called a ROOTlet, that allows convenient access from within ROOT to
a collection of Clarens-based ROOTlet servers, distributed around the Grid. An attractive
feature of the implementation is that the ROOTlets run standard, unadorned instances
of ROOT and the clients only need to
load a small runtime plugin to gain access to the loosely-coupled system. This paper
describes these developments, work
in progress and plans for future enhancements.
Primary authors
Dr
Conrad Steenberg
(Caltech)
Dr
Julian Bunn
(Caltech)
