THE PLOUGHSHARE PLATFORM FOR GRID DISTRIBUTION

Many different PDF fitting groups currently prepare their own fast interpolation grids for calculations at NLO and NNLO in order to quickly reproduce production cross sections for parton interaction processes. Previously there was no platform to bring the grids generated by all these PDF groups together. Such a platform will open a door to a much faster way of evaluating and distributing these cross section grids. In this work, a web platform dubbed ploughshare is presented which is a flexible front end interface allowing for the upload of cross section grids from registered authors from the various groups. In addition included is a backend which achieves uploaded grids to a standardized grid database using obligatory configuration file included with the grids in single compact tgz files. In addition a user library is provided which automatically downloads any requested grids if required. The information provided in each configuration files uniquely identifies the details of the related analysis for each grid and make the grids easily available for the entire high energy physics community, providing a much faster way of evaluating fits for the parton distribution functions (PDF) with the specific data sets from which each fit was built.