Simplified access to CMS Open Data with Google’s Colab environment and Google Cloud Storage

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of four multipurpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, located in Switzerland. CMS has made large subsets of the data available to the public through the CERN Open Data Portal, the goal to get people to analyze the data. The CMS Data Preservation and Open Access working group (DPOA) has organized a number of workshops to teach others how to access and analyze these datasets, however it can still be very challenging to use open data, especially if someone just wants to try out some simple ideas. To reduce the overhead further, we created a test case where we host simplified versions of the data on Google Cloud Platform, and provide an example of how to access the data with the cloud-hosted Google Colab python environment. In this poster, we present an approach where we convert open data files from the original format to a more simplified version, after which we upload it to the Google Cloud Platform. From Colab we are able to access the data from a Jupyter notebook environment run on Google’s computersThis notebook provides examples of how to quickly access and prototype analysis. The current status of this study will be presented.