Feicim: A browser and analysis tool for distributed data in particle physics

The Grid was developed to solve large-scale scientific problems by providing access to widearea distributed computing resources. The Grid is used by various communities: high-energy physics, earth observation, biology, etc. LHCb is one of the four Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments based at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). The LHCb experiment produces a huge amount of data. As a single institution does not have the computing resources to handle this data, Grid computing is adopted to store and process the data. Managing PetaBytes of data in distributed environments provides a large scale of challenges related to performance, reliability and scalability. PetaBytes of data are spread over several Grid sites. The users and applications need an efficient mechanism to locate datasets based on their content, which can be achieved by associating descriptive attributes to these datasets and providing the associated information to the users. A Grid service, called the Metadata Catalogue was introduced to perform these tasks. In physics very complex programming environments are used which are becoming ever more complex. Consequently, a lot of time must be invested in learning how to use the existing Grid resources for data analysis. Feicim is a distributed computing tool that integrates a Bookkeeping Metadata Catalog and a representation of data and analysis. Feicim provides datasets, data-content discovery and analysis through the use of a Graphical User Interface. This thesis presents my research into the functionality and design of Feicim. I present my current effort in the LHCb experiment to use data-content, dataset discovery and analysis within the Feicim framework.