Tutorial 2019 June

This is a page is under development: please do not use! Starting page for the June 2019 Mu2e Tutorials

Introduction

These wiki-based Computing and Software tutorials are the first Mu2e tutorials in four years. In these, we will cover how to work with the most up-to-date tools and datasets, including last year's Mock Data Challenge (MDC2018), which production is only recently finished.

The tutorials will be held at the University of Minnesota as part of the June 2019 Mu2e Collaboration meeting, please see | doc 25980 for the agenda. Because of limited connectivity and latency from UMn, we will not work with computing resources specific to Fermilab in these tutorials. Those topics will be covered in a later set of tutorials that will be held at FNAL.

The topics presented in these tutorials were selected based on a survey of Mu2e members interests and prior knowledge, the results of which can be found here.

Because of limited staffing, we will hold the tutorials in a single room. To cover the wide range of prior knowledge indicated by the survey, the tutorials will be mostly self-paced.

Before your arrive in Minnesota

To participate in the tutorials you must bring your own laptop computer. Mac, Windows, and Linux based computers are in principle all supported, but you must prepare your computer in advance according to the following instructions. We recommend that you try to perform the following install at least 1 week before the tutorial, so that you can get help if you have problems. Please post your problems to the Mu2e Computing Help Hypernews.

We will use a docker container to provide all participants with a uniform computing environment. Your laptop must have enough free disk space to allow downloading and installing the docker container, which will be about 6 GBytes. Once loaded, the docker container will create a virtual machine on your computer which emulates one of the MU2EGPVM machines at Fermilab. Most, but not all, of the functionality you would have on a MU2EGPVM login session will be available to you from the docker image.

To download the tutorial docker container you must first install docker itself on your computer. Instructions for that are given here .

Prerequisites

If you understand the information below you should find the tutorials fairly straightforward. If you are learning this material as you go along, it will take longer to work through the tutorials.  That's OK.  Take your time and learn what you need to be effective in Mu2e.

Sessions

The tutorial is divided into sessions, each with its own leader(s). Each session will cover a broad topic, with exercises progressing from introductory to expert. Noone is expected to finish all the exercises. The session leaders will indicate appropriate starting points in the exercise list depending on the experience level of the attendee. A template for a new tutorial session can be found here. Guidelines for tutorial session and exercise preparation can be found below. Below is the linked list of sessions with their associated leader(s).

Overview of the Mu2e Experiment	Sarah Demers
Working with Mu2e Offline	Ray Culbertson, Rob Kutschke
Running an 'art' job in Mu2e Offline	Richie Bonventre, Ralf Ehrlich, Rob Kutschke
Using Root	Sophie Middleton, Richie Bonventre
Using STNtuple for analysis	Giani Pezzullo, Pasha Murat
Using TrkAna for analysis	Andy Edmonds, Dave Brown
Writing an Offline art module	Andy Edmonds, ..
Data Structures and Processing Sequences	Rob Kutschke, Dave Brown, ...

Exercises

List of exercises (or links to exercises) ...

Instructions for Session Leaders

Please read all of the instructions below before starting to plan your session!

An important goal for this tutorial is that the attendees will spend most of their time working on exercises, not listening to us talk. We expect that the people attending this tutorial will have a broad spectrum of computing skills, HEP experience and familiarity with Mu2e. To address this we would like each session to contain many exercises that we can order from beginner level to advanced level. We do not expect every attendee to do every exercise in the allotted time; instead we expect that each attendee will decide to work on the exercises that make sense given their prior experience and their interests. We expect that many people will get started on exercises during the tutorial day and will complete more exercises at a later date.

We hope that most sessions will fit into the following plan; the only exception to this is the first session, which is a lecture overview.

• Most tutorial sessions will be 1 hour long
• Each session will have a page on this wiki. Rob and Dave will tell you where to find the page for your session.
• At the tutorial, each session leader will give a short introductory presentation that gives an overview of the ideas introduced by the exercises. Keeping it under 5 minutes is great and under 10 minutes is OK.
• This introductory information should also be present near the top of the wiki page. If you can give the presentation using the wiki, that's better than using slides.
• The introductory material should contain a list of prerequisites and co-requisites, which may include other tutorials or suggested reading.
• Following the presentation, the session leader will direct the students to a series of exercises that they can work on.
• The instructions for the exercises should be on the wiki page for the session.
• The instructions should contain links to supporting and/or reference material that the attendees will find useful.
• While the attendees are working on the exercises, the session leaders and helpers will circulate among the attendees to answer questions.
• If a question comes up frequently the session leader or designate can give a short presentation about that question.
• In some sessions, it might make sense for the session leader to devote that last 5 or 10 minutes of the session to presenting his/her answer to some of the exercises.
• To the extent possible, the session leaders should design wiki pages and exercises so that people can work at their own pace both during and after the tutorial day.
• When planning your time budget, remember that it may take 5 to 10 minutes for people to get started on the first exercise.