Title
Optimizing ROOT IO For Analysis
Abstract
The ROOT I/O ( RIO) subsystem is foundational to most HEP experiments - it provides a file format, a set of APIs/semantics, and a reference implementation in C++. It is often found at the base of an experiment's framework and is used to serialize the experiment's data; in the case of an LHC experiment, this may be hundreds of petabytes of files! Individual physicists will further use RIO to perform their end-stage analysis, reading from intermediate files they generate from experiment data. RIO is thus incredibly flexible: it must serve as a file format for archival ( optimized for space) and for working data ( optimized for read speed). To date, most of the technical work has focused on improving the former use case. We present work designed to help improve RIO for analysis. We analyze the real-world impact of a compression algorithm LZ4 to decrease decompression times ( and the corresponding cost in disk space). We introduce new APIs that read RIO data in bulk, removing the per-event overhead of a C++ function call. We compare the performance with the existing RIO APIs for simple structure data and show how this can be complimentary with efforts to improve the parallelism of the RIO stack.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1088/1742-6596/1085/3/032012
Journal of Physics Conference Series
Field
DocType
Volume
File format,Large Hadron Collider,Serialization,Subroutine,Computer science,Petabyte,Reference implementation,Operating system,Semantics,Distributed computing
Journal
1085
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1742-6588
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Brian Bockelman110.70
Zhe Zhang23111.51
Jim Pivarski311.11