General Description

  STAR offline software consists of a great number of interconnected programs and data structures. The computer codes which model the dynamics of relativistic heavy ion collisions, referred to as ``event generators,'' are standalone programs which the user runs either directly or by executing a UNIX shell script. GSTAR, which is STAR's implementation of Geant 3, simulates particle propagation, secondary particle production, decays and interactions of the particles produced in collision events with the detector material and registers hits in the sensitive detector volumes and records tracks, decay vertices and interaction vertices. GSTAR is also run in standalone mode either by executing a script or it can be run interactively. All codes which simulate detector response, handle event reconstruction and calibration, and which will be used for physics analysis are run within an overarching analysis framework. This analysis framework, which was motivated and briefly discussed in the preceding, links together the analysis codes and data structures developed by many individual users together with I/O, graphics, histogramming and data analysis tools in a transparent way. This framework is called the Standard Analysis Framework or StAF (a.k.a. the STAR Analysis Framework or STAF) and, although developed for STAR, has now been adopted by the PHENIX collaboration and is available to the entire RHIC community. A significant amount of STAR SOFI developed software, plus CERN software and commercial software collectively constitute the core of STAF.