STNTUPLE

STNTUPLE is two things:

1. an ntuple data format
2. a light-weight ntuple analysis framework, used for many years by the CDF experiment at Fermilab and ported to Mu2e.

The assumptions which lead to development of STNTUPLE are as follows:

• in any experiment, over time ntuples become large. De-facto, they become mini-DST's.
• Ntuple datasets also become large, one needs a way to share them and use distributed storage for them
• "Click-on-TNtuple"-based mode doesn't work for publication-level analysis. To be able to efficiently re-submit a job and to deal with multiple jobs one needs a framework
• for reproducibility, analysis jobs should be configured and driven by scripts
• analysis code quickly becomes rather sophisticated. It can't be used in interpreted mode - has to be compiled
• HEP uses C++ for compiled code. Using one language is better (simpler) than two - all scripting is done using ROOT C++ interpreting capabilities.