Podd version 1.6-alpha1

The Hall A software team is pleased to present the first alpha release of version 1.6 of the C++ analysis software Podd. This version contains many significant improvements motivated by the long experience with version 1.5. This is still an alpha release, i.e. not all features have yet been frozen. The first beta release will follow within the next few weeks.

Version 1.6 is not binary compatible nor fully source-compatible with the previous release 1.5. Several parts of the programming interface have changed. As a result, libraries and plug-ins for version 1.5 will have to be recompiled and, in some cases, minor source code changes may be necessary.

As much as possible, the bug fixes as well as some of the additional functionality of this release will be) backported to version 1.5. We plan to support version 1.5 for several years into the future because many earlier Hall A experiments have spent considerable effort on developing complex libraries for this release. They should not be forced to upgrade. For new development, however, version 1.6 is strongly recommended.

The main improvements in this release are the modular decoder, the unbundled EVIO library, and a rewrite of the VDC reconstruction code. Additionally, we plan to switch all analysis classes to the a database API (introduced in version 1.5 and generalized since then), but this part is not yet included in this alpha version.

What's new

• The EVIO subsystem is loaded from an external shared library. This brings support for the latest version of EVIO (currently 4.4.6) and permits updating of EVIO without having to rebuild the core analyzer. If EVIO is not installed on the user's system, the analyzer build system will attempt to download and install it automatically.
• The decoder has been rewritten to support drivers for front-end hardware as plug-ins. New decoding routines for new hardware can be added easily via user-written shared libraries. Documentation can be found here
• The new decoder makes the processing of different event or trigger types configurable via "event type handler" plug-ins.
• Preliminary support is available for JLab 12 GeV pipelined electronics (FADC250, F1TDC, etc.)
• The generic hardware channel decoder, THaDecData has been completely rewritten, using an object-oriented design.
• The track reconstruction of the VDCs of the Hall A HRS spectrometers has been rewritten. Known bugs have been fixed. The reconstruction of multi-cluster events should be greatly improved.
• The VDC efficiency calculation code has been moved from THaDecData into a standalone physics module, VDCeff.
• Many limitations of the formula and test package have been removed. It is now possible to define formulas and tests on variable-sized arrays, including std::vector global variables.
• Explicit support for simulation input data has been added, simplifying the handling of Monte Carlo truth data (base class Podd::SimDecoder).
• There is experimental support for building the analyzer with the scons build system. Users will have to install scons version 2.1 or greater themselves.
• Support for the most recent version 5 of ROOT and current versions of gcc/g++.
• Miscellaneous minor bug fixes.

Compatibility

System requirements

• Linux with gcc/g++ 4 or higher; or Mac OS X 10.6 or higher with gcc/g++ 4 or higher
• ROOT 5.10 or higher. Version 5.34 stongly recommended.
• GNU make
• Reasonably powerful hardware (2GHz CPU, 1GB RAM). Less will work, but it won't be fun.

• RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 and 7 with default compilers (gcc/g++ 4.1.2, 4.4.7 and 4.8.5) and ROOT 5.30 and 5.34.
• Fedora 14 and up with default compilers and ROOT 5.28 and 5.34.
• Mac OS X 10.6 through 10.11 with the default command-line development tools.

Building and installing the software

Running the program / How to analyze data

Example Scripts

Documentation

Credits