Description

ROOT was designed mainly for the Large Hadron Collider by a collection of CERN scientists concerned with the huge amount of data to be simulated, collected, and analyzed. For more information, see the main ROOT website http://root.cern.ch/.

The ROOT system provides a set of Object-Oriented frameworks with all the functionality needed to handle and analyse large amounts of data in a very efficient way. Having the data defined as a set of objects, specialised storage methods are used to get direct access to the separate attributes of the selected objects, without having to touch the bulk of the data. Included are histograming methods in 1, 2 and 3 dimensions, curve fitting, function evaluation, minimisation, graphics and visualization classes to allow the easy setup of an analysis system that can query and process the data interactively or in batch mode.

Thanks to the builtin CINT C++ interpreter the command language, the scripting, or macro, language and the programming language are all C++. The interpreter allows for fast prototyping of the macros since it removes the time consuming compile/link cycle. It also provides a good environment to learn C++. If more performance is needed the interactively developed macros can be compiled using a C++ compiler.

The system has been designed in such a way that it can query its databases in parallel on MPP machines or on clusters of workstations or high-end PC's. ROOT is an open system that can be dynamically extended by linking external libraries. This makes ROOT a premier platform on which to build data acquisition, simulation and data analysis systems.

Version

5.14

How to Use

Initialization

csh/tcsh:

$ setenv ROOTSYS /usr/local/ROOT/
$ setenv PATH ${ROOTSYS}/bin:${PATH}
$ setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ${ROOTSYS}/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

bash:

$ export ROOTSYS=/usr/local/ROOT
$ export PATH=$PATH:$ROOTSYS/bin
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ROOTSYS/lib

Running ROOT

[user@helix ~]$ root
  *******************************************
  *                                         *
  *        W E L C O M E  to  R O O T       *
  *                                         *
  *   Version   5.14/00  14 December 2006   *
  *                                         *
  *  You are welcome to visit our Web site  *
  *          http://root.cern.ch            *
  *                                         *
  *******************************************

FreeType Engine v2.1.9 used to render TrueType fonts.
Compiled on 18 January 2007 for linux with thread support.

CINT/ROOT C/C++ Interpreter version 5.16.16, November 24, 2006
Type ? for help. Commands must be C++ statements.
Enclose multiple statements between { }.
root [0] .q
[user@helix ~]$

NOTE: The ROOT GUI requires X-Windows.

Documentation

User's Guide at the CERN website.