Dear BRAHMS
The following is a summary of the BRAHMS software workshop held
June 4-6, 1997 at BNL.
ROOT has been investigated over the past 3 months on several different
fronts. The most substantial investigation was initiated by Ziping Chen
in reading GEANT files to construct ROOT trees in a ROOT file using the ROOT
framework. ROOT was then used to generate various distributions. This
was found to be relatively simple and intuitive.
A report on using STAF (ScienTific Analysis Framework; formerly
STar Analysis Framework) as learned from a STAF tutorial workshop at BNL
several weeks ago was given as a starting point for trying to play around
with this program. There were lengthy discussions on STAF and one big
advantage STAF has is that it will be used by STAR and PHENIX and will
probabally be supported in some real way by the RCF. Later two trivial
STAF modules and tables were generated to learn the ease with which that
can be accomplished. It was not trivial to insert these trivial routines,
but we eventually succeeded. We will generate some more realistic routines
this summer to perform the same exercise as was done with ROOT above to get
a more realistic idea of how to use the program.
The details of using GEANT were described with emphasis on Drift Chambers.
T5 had already been split from one volume to three separate submodules. In
one of the working sessions we learned about getting GEANT out of CVS and then
building and running it. After that t4 and t3 were separated into separate
submodules and reinserted into the CVS repository.
There were two reports dealing with databases. One concerned Oracle and
how it might be used as a database for the BRAHMS experiment. The other
concerned Objectivity which is an object oriented database. This is the
database pushed by PHENIX and agreed upon by the RHIC community to be purchased
at least for a trial basis. It is built as an object oriented database from
the ground up. Not having the product documentation in hand and not having
had any experience with it to date, details were rather sketchy, but from
what we could tell, it is very powerful and seems as if it could be used
in a seamless way for many things from the DAQ to the physics analysis. BRAHMS
signed on with the other RHIC experiments to the purchase of the developers
license which I think gives us one license to develop things and get some
experience with it before deciding to jump all the way in.
The current status of the C++ version of SONATA was presented and discussed.
The status of this project to convert it to act like the FORTRAN version is
around 90% complete. After that is accomplished several changes can be made
using some of the features of C++ to try and optomize the performance. To
date the benchmarks performed indicate an increase in performance between
~1.5 and 4 depending on how the numbers are interpreted. There were caveats
in every benchmark as it was never possible to run it on the same machine
as the FORTRAN version runs on. (especially with the same events) This will
change very soon. We also discussed coding and style conventions and decided
to implement the same coding convention used in ROOT as documented in their
WEB page.
This summary can also be found on the WEB page in
http://www.rhic.bnl.gov/export1/brahms/WWW/private/computing/brsoft_jun97
Regards
Kris
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