RAMTools
Tools for RAM (ROOT Alignment/Map), a format for genomic alignment data built on ROOT's RNTuple.
- Organisation
- CERN-HSF, through Google Summer of Code
- Period
- 2025 – present
- Stack
- C++17, ROOT RNTuple
- Code
- compiler-research/ramtools
RAM (ROOT Alignment/Map) is a format for sequencing alignments built on RNTuple, the columnar storage CERN’s ROOT uses for physics data. RAMTools converts SAM and BAM files to RAM and answers the same queries as samtools. I built it during Google Summer of Code 2025 and have maintained it since.
What I did
- Converters from SAM and BAM to RAM, multithreaded, with output order preserved so files stay queryable.
- Region queries by binary search directly over the columns, with no separate index.