CutLang v2: Advances in a Runtime-Interpreted Analysis Description Language for HEP Data

Abstract

We will present the latest developments in CutLang, the runtime interpreter of a recently-developed analysis description language (ADL) for collider data analysis. ADL is a domain-specific, declarative language that describes the contents of an analysis in a standard and unambiguous way, independent of any computing framework. In ADL, analyses are written in human-readable plain text files, separating object, variable and event selection definitions in blocks, with a syntax that includes mathematical and logical operations, comparison and optimisation operators, reducers, four-vector algebra and commonly used functions. Adopting ADLs would bring numerous benefits to the LHC experimental and phenomenological communities, ranging from analysis preservation beyond the lifetimes of experiments or analysis software to facilitating the abstraction, design, visualization, validation, combination, reproduction, interpretation and overall communication of the analysis contents. Since their initial release, ADL and CutLang have been used for implementing and running numerous LHC analyses. In this process, the original syntax from CutLang v1 has been modified for better ADL compatibility, and the interpreter has been adapted to work with that syntax, resulting in the current release v2. Furthermore, CutLang has been enhanced to handle object combinatorics, to include tables and weights, to save events at any analysis stage, to benefit from multi-core/multi-CPU hardware among other improvements. In this contribution, these and other enhancements are discussed in details. In addition, real life examples from LHC analyses are presented together with a user manual.

HL-LHC Computing Review Stage 2, Common Software Projects: Data Science Tools for Analysis

“…In HEP, this can mean a complete separation of code and data, such as FAST-carpenter [16], which specifies cuts and quantities to plot using YAML. It can also refer to domain-specific languages that are as declarative as YAML, such as ADL [17], CutLang [18], and func adl [19]. At the very least, it means a separation of the event loop as a Directed Cyclic Graph (DAG) from the calculations performed on each event, as in ROOT's RDataFrame [20], or on a partition of events, as in Coffea's Processor.…”

Democratizing LHC data analysis with ADL/CutLang

“…Work is ongoing to incorporate systematic uncertainties. More detailed information on the ADL syntax can be found in [5]. An analysis written in ADL can be run with any framework that parses and executes the ADL syntax.…”

“…Currently CutLang [3][4][5] is the most developed tool for ADL analyses. CutLang is a runtime interpreter meaning that it can directly run on the ADL file without requiring compilation (except for once during installation) or extra coding by the user.…”

“…As ADL is framework-independent, this can be achieved by any framework that can parse and understand the ADL syntax. Currently, two such frameworks exist that can execute analyses written with ADL syntax at different levels: CutLang [3][4][5] and adl2tnm [2]. The distinction from traditional frameworks is that both CutLang and adl2tnm are automated, and hence the user does not interact directly with these frameworks or do any programming.…”

Analysis Description Language: A DSL for HEP Analysis

“…On the external DSL side, the most developed example is "Analysis Description Language", or shortly ADL [11,12,13], which is a declarative DSL describing the physics content of a HEP analysis in a standard and unambiguous way in a framework-independent manner. There also exists a toy language called PartiQL, designed to demonstrating features that would be a radical departure from general purpose languages, addressing problems specific to particle physics [14].…”