The PROOF Analysis Framework (PAF) is a tool to easily and quickly implement distributed analysis over ROOT trees by hiding as much as possible the inherent complexities of parallel paradigms to the final users and by providing a common framework for some of the different technologies available.

The analysis of the complex LHC data usually follows a standard path that aims at minimizing not only the amount of data but also the number of observables used. After a number of steps of slimming and skimming the data, the remaining few terabytes of ROOT files typically hold a selection of the events in a flat structure for the variables used that can be more easily inspected and traversed in the final stages of the analysis. PROOF arises at this point as an efficient mechanism to distribute the analysis load by taking advantage of all the cores in modern CPUs through PROOF Lite, or by using PROOF Cluster or PROOF on Demand tools to build dynamic PROOF clusters on computing facilities with spare CPUs.

However using PROOF at the level required for a serious analysis introduces some complexities that may scare new adopters. We have developed this PROOF Analysis Framework to facilitate the development of new analysis by uniformly exposing the PROOF related configurations across technologies and by taking care of the tedious and repetitive tasks as much as possible.