Offline Simulation Software CMSSW_3_1_1 - getting started

This document will explain how to use TOTEM offline software.

Documentation

• The CMS Offline WorkBook, especially:
  • Setting up your Computing Environment

STEP 0.

Let us login via ssh to some remote machine. It might be lxplus, but we will use our own PC pctotem31.cern.ch (4 processors, most of the time stands free).

ssh -X grzanka@pctotem31.cern.ch

Mine account on pctotem31 (grzanka) differs from my normal CERN account (lgrzanka), so I will request kerberos ticket, in order to have access to distributed AFS disk space.

kinit lgrzanka

STEP 1.

Let us create some temporary directory

mkdir -p tmp/offlineSWTest
cd tmp/offlineSWTest

We have to load default set of environment variables which are necessary for work with CMSSW. Script containing these variables is stored in the directory where CMSSW framework and all necessary libraries are installed. There are two places where you can find CMSSW_3_1_1 framework installed:

IMPORTANT In January 2012 CMS installation has been removed from AFS (/afs/cern.ch/cms/sw/), please use TOTEM installation

When working on hosts with SLC5 or higher, this is necessary:

export SCRAM_ARCH=slc4_ia32_gcc345

Let us use TOTEM installation, type in bash:

source /afs/cern.ch/exp/totem/soft/local_cmssw_slc4/cmsset_default.sh

Now we have access to scram command. We can check that by typing:

scram help

STEP 2.

We will compile our software from sources.

First we initialize CMSSW project area:

scram project CMSSW CMSSW_3_1_1

After that your workspace called CMSSW_3_1_1 is created, this is the default name for the working directory. It is also possible to specify another directory as your workspace by:

scram project -n <your_given_name> CMSSW CMSSW_3_1_1

We can see that after that command following directory structure emerged:

[pctotem31] /home/grzanka/tmp/offlineSWTest > ls CMSSW_3_1_1/
bin  config  doc  include  lib  logs  module  python  share  src  test

IMPORTANT There is a bug in standard version of Geant4 shipped with CMSSW_3_1_1, which is causing simulation to crash with energy 3.5 TeV, so in this case please follow instruction provided here to install correct version of Geant4.

Our sources shall go to CMSSW_3_1_1/src subdirectory, so let us first check out the code from Totem SVN to that directory. You might need to add the username in SVN path (use simply svn+ssh://lgrzanka@svn.cern.ch):

[pctotem31] /home/grzanka/tmp/offlineSWTest > svn co svn+ssh://svn.cern.ch/reps/totem/branches/CMSSW_3_1_1/cmssw/src CMSSW_3_1_1/src/
[pctotem31] /home/grzanka/tmp/offlineSWTest > ls CMSSW_3_1_1/src/
Configuration  Doxyfile         doxyStyle.css  IOMC            RecoTotemT1T2   SimG4Core       TotemAnalysis     TotemDatabaseService  TotemRPValidation
DataFormats    doxyFooter.html  EventFilter    L1TriggerTotem  SimDataFormats  SimTotem        TotemBackground   TotemDQM              TotemT1T2Validation
Documentation  doxyHeader.html  Geometry       RecoTotemRP     SimG4CMS        TotemAlignment  TotemCondFormats  TotemRawData          Visualisation

Some example configuration files you can find in CMSSW_3_1_1/src/Configuration/TotemStandardSequences/test/

Now let us start compilation. Our machine has 4 processors, so we can run compilation in 8 threads to speedup this process. Still this will take some time (10-15 minutes).

cd CMSSW_3_1_1/src
scram build (or scram b)
[ scram b -j 8 is another option to run build which will use 8 threads to compile the code. However this will use too much resource on pctotem31. 
So please only use this command late in a day such as in the evening. ]

Now we need to setup runtime environment. Before executing following command be sure to be in some subdirectory of CMSSW_3_1_1 :

eval `scram runtime -sh`

This will enable us to use cmsRun command.

cmsRun --help

Now we can go back to ~/tmp/offlineSWTest directory

cd ~/tmp/offlineSWTest

STEP 3.

Let us take example configuration file:

CMSSW_3_1_1/src/Configuration/TotemStandardSequences/test/RP/prodRPelasticBeta90Energy7TeV_cfg.py

Check number of events to generate:

process.maxEvents = cms.untracked.PSet(
    input = cms.untracked.int32(10)
)

Check output file:

exec 'process.' + str(process.outpath) + '.fileName = cms.untracked.string("file:prodRPelasticBeta90Energy7TeV.root")'

Check sequence of modules to execute:

process.p1 = cms.Path(process.generator*
process.SmearingGenerator*
process.OptInfo*
process.g4SimHits*
process.mix*
process.RPSiDetDigitizer*
process.RPClustProd*
process.RPHecoHitProd*
process.RPSinglTrackCandFind*
process.RPSingleTrackCandCollFit*
process.ElasticReconstruction*
process.RPCC)

Now we can run that file:

CMSSW_3_1_1/src/Configuration/TotemStandardSequences/test/RP/
cmsRun prodRPelasticBeta90Energy7TeV_cfg.py

If everything went OK, then we can find output file:

[pctotem31] /home/grzanka/tmp/offlineSWTest > ls -l *root
-rw-rw-r--  1 grzanka grzanka 286512 Aug  7 20:14 prodRPelasticBeta90Energy7TeV.root

STEP 4.

Now we can generate some plots.

We can start root session, to see plots:

[pctotem31] /home/grzanka/tmp/offlineSWTest > root -l
root [0] TBrowser t

-- LeszekGrzanka - 16-Jan-2012