  The HEP community is approaching an era were the excellent performances of
the particle accelerators in delivering collision at high rate will force the
experiments to record a large amount of information. The growing size of the
datasets could potentially become a limiting factor in the capability to
produce scientific results timely and efficiently. Recently, new technologies
and new approaches have been developed in industry to answer to the necessity
to retrieve information as quickly as possible to analyze PB and EB datasets.
Providing the scientists with these modern computing tools will lead to
rethinking the principles of data analysis in HEP, making the overall
scientific process faster and smoother.
  In this paper, we are presenting the latest developments and the most recent
results on the usage of Apache Spark for HEP analysis. The study aims at
evaluating the efficiency of the application of the new tools both
quantitatively, by measuring the performances, and qualitatively, focusing on
the user experience. The first goal is achieved by developing a data reduction
facility: working together with CERN Openlab and Intel, CMS replicates a real
physics search using Spark-based technologies, with the ambition of reducing 1
PB of public data in 5 hours, collected by the CMS experiment, to 1 TB of data
in a format suitable for physics analysis.
  The second goal is achieved by implementing multiple physics use-cases in
Apache Spark using as input preprocessed datasets derived from official CMS
data and simulation. By performing different end-analyses up to the publication
plots on different hardware, feasibility, usability and portability are
compared to the ones of a traditional ROOT-based workflow.
