CMS Analysis Operations

During normal data taking CMS expects to support potentially as many as 2000 analysis users. Since the beginning of 2008 there have been more than 800 individuals who submitted a remote analysis job to the CMS computing infrastructure. The bulk of these users will be supported at the over 40 CMS Tier-2 centres. Supporting a globally distributed community of users on a globally distributed set of computing clusters is a task that requires reconsidering the normal methods of user support for Analysis Operations. In 2008 CMS formed an Analysis Support Task Force in preparation for large-scale physics analysis activities. The charge of the task force was to evaluate the available support tools, the user support techniques, and the direct feedback of users with the goal of improving the success rate and user experience when utilizing the distributed computing environment. The task force determined the tools needed to assess and reduce the number of non-zero exit code applications submitted through the grid interfaces and worked with the CMS experiment dashboard developers to obtain the necessary information to quickly and proactively identify issues with user jobs and data sets hosted at various sites. Results of the analysis group surveys were compiled. Reference platforms for testing and debugging problems were established in various geographic regions. The task force also assessed the resources needed to make the transition to a permanent Analysis Operations task. In this presentation the results of the task force will be discussed as well as the CMS Analysis Operations plans for the start of data taking.