CRAB: the CMS distributed analysis tool development and design

Starting from 2007 the CMS experiment will produce several Pbytes of data each year, to be distributed over many computing centers located in many different countries. The CMS computing model defines how the data are to be distributed such that CMS physicists can access them in an efficient manner in order to perform their physics analysis. CRAB (CMS Remote Analysis Builder) is a specific tool, designed and developed by the CMS collaboration, that facilitates access to the distributed data in a very transparent way. The tool's main feature is the possibility of distributing and parallelizing the local CMS batch data analysis processes over different Grid environments without any specific knowledge of the underlying computational infrastructures. More specifically CRAB allows the transparent usage of WLCG, gLite and OSG middleware. CRAB interacts with both the local user environment, with CMS Data Management services and with the Grid middleware.