FREE SOFTWARE DIRECTORY

root

Having had many years of experience in developing the interactive data analysis systems PAW and PIAF and the simulation package GEANT, we realized that the growth and maintainability of these products, written in FORTRAN and using some 20 year old libraries, had reached its limits. Although still very popular, these systems do not scale up to the challenges offered by the LHC, where the amount of data to be simulated and analyzed is a few orders of magnitude larger than anything seen before. It became time to re-think our approach to large scale data analysis and simulation and at the same time we had to profit from the progress made in computer science over the past 15 to 20 years. Especially in the area of Object-Oriented design and development. Thus was born ROOT. We started the ROOT project in the context of the NA49 experiment at CERN. NA49 generates an impressive amount of data, about 10 Terabytes of raw data per run. This data rate is of the same order of magnitude as the rates expected to be recorded by the LHC experiments. Therefore, NA49 is an ideal environment to develop and test the next generation data analysis tools and to study the problems related to the organization and analysis of such large amounts of data.

Last updated 16 Jun, 2006