Athena workshop

Introduction

This is the place where information about the ATHENA workshop will be made available. ATHENA is the control framework of ATLAS. It is based on Gaudi. Getting started with ATHENA is quite difficult and one can easily get lost. The october workshop held at NIKHEF will provide a first introduction to ATHENA.

The aim of the workshop is:

• get familiar with CMT (Configuration Management Tool). This is the environment used to run ATHENA and maintain/develop its packages.
• introduce a beginner to ATHENA and its concepts such as Algorithms, Tools, DataStorage and the like
• explain the usage of python scripts (jobOptions) in order to steer ATHENA
• excersise on a part of the ATHENA-chain: do reconstruction and analysis

The aim of the workshop is not:

• an introduction to C++ and python programming. Although experience in C++ is absolutely necessary for using and understanding ATHENA we won't go into it. Little knowledge on python won't limit ones capabilities on using ATHENA.
• give a detailed explaination of the technicalities behind CMT and ATHENA. Due to little time we won't go deep into the details.

In order to maximize efficiency of the latter parts of the tutorial, it is recommended to do the Pre-Tutorial before starting with the main tutorial! Preferably before the first session on monday, so that the topics covered will be more familiar. In case that the pre-tutorial is too difficult, one might prefer to do the pre-tutorial tuesday (morning).

Athena generalities

Monday 23th October.

• introduction to CMT and environment set up.
• explaination directory structure
• requirement files
• handy tools of CMT (co, get_tag, etc)
• navigating through packages (CVS, LXR)
• introducing ATHENA and its most used abstract classes: Algorithms, Tools, TDS
• steering ATHENA with jobOptions python scripts

Links to the presentations are given here:

• Introduction, the introductionary talk of the workshop.
• CMT basics, the talk covering CMT, CVS and LXR.
• ATHENA basics, the talk covering ATHENA.

Links to the answers of the exercises will be put here, before the beginning of November.

• packageExample.
• AlgorithmExample.
• toolExample.
• propertiesExample.
• finalExercise.

Reconstruction

Tuesday 24th October.

• the RecExCommon package
• examples of reconstruction
• running over Raw Data Objects
• using different parts of the Detector/ different algorithms
• production of ESD/AOD/TAG objects
• if there's time: how to customize your reconstruction chain

Links to the presentations are given here:

• ATHENA comments, the talk rounding up the ATHENA basics part of the workshop.
• Reconstruction, the part covering RecExCommon is discussed here.

Physics Analysis Tools (PAT)

PAT-Tutorial Wednesday 25th October.

• Pre-Tutorial
• Event Selection
• Event Selection using TAG
• Event Selection using AAN
• Interactive Analysis in ATHENA
• Analysis with the EventView
• Analysis on the GRID
• PANDA/PATHENA
• GANGA
• DQ2 Tools

Documentation

Of course, a lot of links can provide even more information on CMT, ATHENA, Reconstruction and PAT.