This proposal requests support for a collaborative effort between investigators at MIT and Rice University to integrate access to the Grid computing model with the existing ROOT software framework, which is the de-facto standard in high energy and nuclear physics data analyses. To deal with the large amounts of data to be collected by the high energy physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, CMS and the other LHC collaborations are adopting the Grid paradigm that aims to provide consistent and efficient access to geographically distributed computing resources. The goal of the project is to make Grid services available to ROOT users. This will be based on the PROOF extension of ROOT and will be implemented in close collaboration with the ROOT authors at CERN. Phase I will involve the initial design, development and prototyping cycle and a detailed benchmarking and evaluation period. In phase II, production versions will be used on existing clusters for RHIC data and CMS simulation data.
