CERN RD45 status report: A persistent object manager for HEP

RD45 is a CERN project to investigate the issues concerning the storage and manip- ulation of persistent objects for LHC era HEP experiments. There are a number of existing efforts committed to the exploration of Object Oriented (00) techniques in a wide variety of key areas for HEP computing in the LHC era. All of these projects will need to handle persistent objects but none of them are addressing this question directly. The goal of the RD45 project is to address the requirements of these projects and of the LHC experiments themselves in terms of object persistency. An important theme of the project is the use of standards. We start by identifying the standards involved, we explain their interaction and examine their suitability for HEP computing environments. We then describe the various prototyping activities that we have undertaken and present the results that have been obtained so far. Finally, we examine future directions and discuss the impact of the proposed technologies on HEP computing in general.