The CDF Analysis Farm

Since the beginning of Run II in 2001 the Fermilab Tevatron has been delivering proton-antiproton collisions to CDF with a steadily increasing performance. By the end of Run II up to 8 fb-1 of integrated luminosity are expected to be available on tape. In order to provide the CDF Collaboration members with adequate computing resources for analyzing those data, a globally distributed pool of dedicated PC farms has been commissioned and is currently being successfully deployed. This paper describes the main features of the CDF Analysis Farm with particular attention to the user perspective. The last part is devoted to a brief overview of the more relevant technical details on the farm implementation and, finally, the future developments toward its integration in the GRID framework are outlined. © 2005 American Institute of Physics.