The CERN Program Library or CERNLIB is a collection of FORTRAN77 libraries and modules, maintained "as is" by CERN

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

. Its content ranges from more specialized data analysis

Data analysis

Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making...

 of high energy physics to general purpose numerical analysis

Numerical analysis

Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation for the problems of mathematical analysis ....

. Lower-level parts of the CERN Program Library are most prominently used by the data analysis software PAW

Physics Analysis Workstation

The Physics Analysis Workstation is an interactive, scriptable computer software tool for data analysis and graphical presentation in high energy physics. Developed at CERN since 1986, it is optimized for processing very large amounts of data...

 and the detector simulation framework GEANT

GEANT (program)

GEANT is the name of a series of simulation software designed to describe the passage of elementary particles through matter, using Monte Carlo methods. The name is an acronym formed from "GEometry ANd Tracking". Originally developed at CERN for high energy physics experiments, today GEANT has...

 (which themselves are contained in the CERN Program Library).

The major fields covered by the libraries contained therein are:

• Detector simulation
• Elementary particle
  Elementary particle
  In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a particle not known to have substructure; that is, it is not known to be made up of smaller particles. If an elementary particle truly has no substructure, then it is one of the basic building blocks of the universe from which...
  
   data
• Graphics and plotting
• Hadron
  Hadron
  In particle physics, a hadron is a composite particle made of quarks held together by the strong force...
  
  ic event generation
  Event generator
  Event generators are software libraries that generate simulated high-energy particle physics events.They randomly generate events as those produced in particle accelerators, collider experiments or during the initial phases of the Universe creation....
  
  
• I/O
  I/O
  I/O may refer to:* Input/output, a system of communication for information processing systems* Input-output model, an economic model of flow prediction between sectors...
  
   and structured data storage
• Numerical analysis
• Statistics
  Statistics
  Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
  
   and data analysis

CERN Program Library uses the year as its version, with not explicitly denoted minor revisions within a year. Besides legacy software dependency, for newer applications written in C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, CERNLIB is mostly superseded by ROOT

ROOT

ROOT is an object-oriented program and library developed by CERN. It was originally designed for particle physics data analysis and contains several features specific to this field, but it is also used in other applications such as astronomy and data mining....

.

Included applications

The CERNLIB contains the libwww

Libwww

libwww is a highly-modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, and is also the name of the reference implementation of this API....

, the Line Mode Browser and the CERN httpd

CERN httpd

CERN httpd was a web server daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen...

.

Status

The development and support for CERNLIB was discontinued in 2003. Libraries will be continued to be provided "as is" "for ever" but with no new code, no user support and no port to IA64. Recompilations will be done for major new Linux versions, but must be tested by the experiments. If the tests fail, the last working frozen version will be kept: this would be the start of a "museum" system. The CERNLIB build procedure was streamlined and documented for the last release in 2002, to allow non-experts to continue building of CERNLIB on Linux.

External links

• CERN Program Library homepage at CERN