The purpose of this document is to provide the members of STAR who are new to STAR Offline Computing and Software with a comprehensive and straightforward introduction and overview followed by a set of ``hands-on'' tutorials which demonstrate with explicit, key-stroke examples how to use the existing software. Portions of these documents may also be useful to experienced STAR computing users who might need a refresher course or an introduction to new software releases. By preparing these documents and tutorials it is my intention to provide STAR members, who are willing to invest 2 or 3 days effort, with the means to become familiar with the basic concepts and elements of STAR offline computing and software, in the hopes that they will gain sufficient understanding of the system to allow them to push ahead on their own and develop in-depth knowledge and expertise in their particular area of interest. These documents and tutorials are certainly not enough to make anyone an expert, but they should be enough to provide a solid foundation for a dedicated user to build on.
The STAR Computing and Software environment and capabilities are in constant development and periodically go through dramatic phase transitions. As these latter, more sweeping changes occur in the future, new documents and tutorials will be added to these pages and may be selected from the following menu.
The written material is also structured in a way to permit users who are mostly interested in running existing codes for simulations to skip the sections which are primarily aimed at users who intend to develop software or customize the analysis chain.
These documents contain the following:
New STAR computing users must have an account at the RHIC Computing Facility (RCF) at BNL as well as an AFS account. Please follow the steps in the first section of the following pages before attempting any of the tutorials. Also, new users will find it helpful to have a copy of the Glossary readily available as he or she reads through the following sections.
Many people contributed to the documents and tutorials presented here. Where appropriate I will list their names at the beginning of the sections which they wrote or contributed to. The STAR collaborators contributing to this report are:
Select the STAR Software release version you wish to study:
This document was prepared and is maintained by Lanny Ray.