The National Analysis Facility at DESY - status and use cases by the participating experiments

The German National Analysis Facility (NAF) was set up at DESY, starting end of 2007 in the context of the Helmholtz Alliance “Physics at the Terascale”. The NAF complements the DESY and the German Grid resources, and hence offers users from the German HEP institutes the best possible environment for data analysis. In the first part, the key aspects and components of the NAF are briefly presented with an emphasis on recent improvements. In the second part, the use cases of the three participating LHC experiments, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, will be presented. Differences and commonalities in the usage of the NAF will be shown. Special emphasis will be placed on the usage of PROOF, whose usage on the NAF has been pioneered by CMS. It is now adapted by ATLAS. The third part will concentrate on how the NAF was used for detector optimisation studies in the preparation of one of the ILC LoI’s (ILD 2009), as well as how CALICE uses the NAF for the analysis of their data taken in several test beam experiments performed for detector R & D. Finally, future developments of the NAF are