ProMC Files
ProMC
[Che14] is a library
for the storage of Monte Carlo event records, or other data, in a very
compact binary form. It provides routines for fast input to and output
from these compact data files. It uses "varints" as a way to store and
compress an integer using a variable number of bytes, based on Google's
platform- and language-neutral Protocol Buffers. Real numbers are converted
to integers, e.g. by specifying a smallest unit of energy, momentum and
length. Thereby a low-energy particle can be represented by a smaller
number of bytes.
The current PYTHIA linking and interface is based on ProMC version 1.5;
earlier version will not do. Once you have to installed the ProMC library,
you should configure PYTHIA with
./configure --with-promc=/path/to/ProMC
and recompile the PYTHIA library. As usual more fine-grained options
are available to set paths to binaries, libraries and headers separately,
if need be.
The examples/main46.cc
sample program illustrates how to
write PYTHIA events onto a ProMC file.