DIAL description for Grid2003 (aka Grid3)
David Adams
November 12, 2003


DIAL - Distributed Interactive Analysis of Large datasets

The DIAL project is investigating interactive analysis of large
datasets with the goal of developing a strategy and delivering a
framework that is applicable to high energy physics and others.
The DIAL model is a hierarchy of schedulers which respond to a
user request to process a dataset by splitting the dataset,
processing each sub-dataset, gathering and concatenating results
and delivering the overall result back to the user. These
schedulers come in many flavors and DIAL expects to deliver
a grid service implementation of a scheduler in early 2004.

One of the goals of DIAL is to deliver a system that enables
distributed interactive analysis of the data produced by the ATLAS
experiment. For Grid3, DIAL is providing analysis of the HBOOK
ntuples that are the current endpoint of the ATLAS simulation and
reconstruction chain. The analysis is distributed over computers
in the ATLAS computing farm at Brookhaven National Laboratory.