Eur. Phys. J. A (2015) 51: 183
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2015-15183-y

Regular Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory

Designing a new structure for storing nuclear data

Progress of the Working Party for Evaluation Cooperation subgroup #38

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Ave L-059, 94550, Livermore, CA, USA

^* e-mail: mattoon1@llnl.gov

Received: 10 June 2015
Accepted: 20 July 2015
Published online: 24 December 2015

Abstract

An international effort is underway to design a new structure for storing and using nuclear reaction data, with the goal of eventually replacing the current standard, ENDF-6 (see the formats manual at http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/csewg/docs/endf-manual.pdf). This effort, organized by the Working Party for Evaluation Cooperation, was initiated in 2012 and has resulted in a list of requirements and specifications for how the proposed new structure shall perform. The new structure will take advantage of new developments in computational tools, using a nested hierarchy to store data. The structure can be stored in text form (such as an XML file) for human readability and data sharing, or it can be stored in binary to optimize data access. In this paper, we present the progress towards completing the requirements, specifications and implementation of the new structure.