2009 Beginning Instructions for getting started with ATLAS MC Generation

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To generate and simulate events, you can use the following instructions from the

Atlas WorkBook
and the following:

To get you started with learning the software for the ATLAS
experiment, please take a look at
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/WorkBook. This web site
contains step-by-step instructions on how to use ATLAS software.

You have been given an account on our particle physics cluster
hal.physics.umass.edu. I’ll give you more info on that when I see you.
Please log onto hal4.physics.umass.edu after login onto the main node.

On the page https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/WorkBook,
please go through the following items.

1. Read the various sections under “Introduction”.

2. Follow the instructions in “Setting up your account” under “Getting
Started”. You will find modified instructions on how to set up your
account at UMass in ~willocq/tutorials/14.1.0/SettingUp_on_hal.txt.

3. Follow the instructions in “Running Athena HelloWorld” but check
modified instructions in ~willocq/tutorials/14.1.0/HelloWorld_on_hal.txt.

4. Follow the instructions in “Generating Events” under “Running Athena”.

5. Follow the instructions in “Producing Fast Simulation AOD”.

6. Learn how to perform data analysis reading the AOD files, see
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/viewauth/AtlasProtected/AthenaROOTAccess
and look at “How to run the C++ example” in particular. This is going to
be a bit more difficult so ask if (i.e. when) you get stuck! The page is
password-protected but I can enter my password to let you see the page.
I’ll send more info on this later.

Some general linux (Unix) knowledge will be useful. You should

1. Read about the basic linux commands in
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/WorkBookBasicLinux.

2. If you are not familiar with a text editor on linux, you may want to
learn Emacs, see http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/.

It will be very useful to learn ROOT which is an interactive data
analysis environment. There is a basic tutorial at
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/RootBasicTutorial and many
more are also available. Go through that basic tutorial. To set up ROOT
you will just need to login and do the usual ATLAS setup:

source ~/cmthome/setup.sh -tag=14.1.0

then to start ROOT, type

root