Kumac Usage and General Approach

STAR Computing	Tutorials main page
Kumac Usage and General Approach
Offline computing tutorial	Maintained by Turner and Wenaus

Need for Kumacs

Kumacs are the scripts, written in KUIP language, used to talk to STAF. They are used in many ways:

to control the PAMS from STAF
to set up the directory structure of tables
to set up global macros
to open and close input and output files
to write or read ntuples
to set initial values in tables
to drive the analysis chains
to make plots or histograms
as wrappers around STAF commands

Kumacs are an integral part of the software, closely coupled to the code, and are released together with the code as a unit.

In general, we use the BigFullChain (BFC) kumacs to run the STAR offline software. All packages and utilities are designed, implemented and run from this one main steering kumac (bfc.kumac). This main steering kumac takes care of simulation, reconstruction, and analysis packages.