ALICE Analysis Framework

The paper describes the current status of the offline analysis framework used in ALICE. The software was designed and optimized to take advantage of distributed computing resources and be compatible with ALICE computing model. The framework’s main features: possibility to use parallelism in PROOF or GRID environments, transparency of the computing infrastructure and data model, scalability and data access performance. The framework provides a common "language" for all ALICE analysis users and is being heavily tested in view of the data to arrive soon.