MCnet Virtual Machine ============================== This package should help you to get started with event generators, steering with AGILe, the validation tool Rivet and the tuning package Professor without the need to compile and install them (as well as various dependencies) step by step. 1. Installing -------------- Download and install VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/). a. Download MCnetVM Package --------------------------- Download the package from http://www.hepforge.org/downloads/professor. For Windows use .exe or .zip, unix-like may want to use .bz2. You can check the md5 hashes to ensure complete/successful download: MD5 (MCnetVM-1.1.bz2) = b12e635953ae2fec8dcbd6410f006cfa MD5 (MCnetVM-1.1.zip) = 83f87c8dce3e64b2febc31f7e4480aa4 MD5 (MCnetVM-1.1.exe) = 3bc50216f9bdfb1c8f70941bee065e6b b1. Unarchive: Linux/Mac ----------------------- Unpack with # bunzip2 -c /path/to/MCnetVM-x.x.tar.bz2 > /path/to/VM/MCnetVM.vdi b2. Unarchive: Windows --------------------------------- Download MCnetVM-x.x.zip oder *.exe, with whichever you feel more comfortable. Unzip with your favorite unpacker or double-klick the self-extracting version. c. Create virtual machine using the downloaded hard disk -------------------------------------------------------- Create a new machine with VirtualBox and follow the GUI. It will ask for the name of the box and the OS. For latter choose Linux -> Other Linux. Give the box a good portion of memory - for the size of the VM we decided to not use swapping. About 1GB should be fine (and possible). Choose 'Use existing harddisk' and navigate to the *.vdi file we opened beforehand. After this, you should be fine with starting the machine. NB: The first time the machine will immediately restart to configure the network, as the MAC addresses of the interfaces have changed from my to your VM, naturally... Now the main part of installation work is done (which was nothing, compared to setting up all the stuff included). You may have noticed, that we are booting a (lightweight but) full-fledged Linux and you can customize as you wish. Most important thing is probably the keyboard layout, which can be set by the 'Lxkeymap' program on the Desktop or by using # setxkbmap ?? in the terminal. Remember to replace ?? by your language code (us, de,...). NB: If you ever need to have root privileges, try "sudo" or "sudo su", which should work without a password. 2. Included are the following hep-packages: ------------------------------ * AGILe 1.3.0 (http://projects.hepforge.org/agile) * Fastjet 2.4.3 (http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~salam/fastjet) * GENSER (http://sftweb.cern.ch/generators, Pythia6:423, Herwig 6.51) * HepMC 2.6.4 (http://lcgapp.cern.ch/project/simu/HepMC) * Herwig++ 2.5.1 (http://projects.hepforge.org/herwig) * LHAPDF 5.8.6b5 (http://projects.hepforge.org/lhapdf) * Professor 1.3.0 (http://projects.hepforge.org/professor) * Pythia8 8:150 (http://home.thep.lu.se/~tobjorn/Pythia.html) * Rivet 1.6.0 (http://projects.hepforge.org/rivet) * Sherpa 1.3.0 (http://www.sherpa-mc.de) * ThePEG 1.7.1 (http://www.thep.lu.se/thepeg) Packages which allow for out-of-source builds via --prefix to configure are placed in ~/sw, others (particular: Pythia6, Herwig and Pythia8) can be found in ~/MCGenerators. The FORTRAN generators should work out-of-the-box with agile-runmc, whereas Sherpa and Herwig++ can be used directly (and should also work out-of-the-box). 3. Getting started ---------------------------- The tools listed above should work 'as are'. Simply create a working directory somewhere in your home directory and start playing with things like: agile-runmc --list-gens agile-runmc Pythia6:423 -n 100 --beams=pp:7TeV -o- | rivet -A To get started with Rivet, the documentation as well as a tutorial talk can be found on the desktop. To get started with Professor, the official tutorial from the website was automatized for you to simply watch professor do the work - and later on inspect what was done and play with it. This is simply done like this: # cd $HOME/Desktop/Professor\ Tutorial/ # ./ProfessorTutorial.sh 4. Patches via RSync ---------------------------- Just in case there will be changes to be deployed during workshops or the like, we added an rsync synchronization suite. The 'master' should make sure that port forwarding into the VM is possible and execute the 'start-rsync-daemon.sh" from desktop. The ones who need to pull execute 'rsync-with-master.sh' from desktop (e.g. double click -> "Execute") and enter the IP address as well as the port number to pull from (e.g. 10.0.0.1:873). NB: Standard rsyncd port is 873, but VirtualBox does not allow to bind to ports < 1024 for Unix-like hosts! 5. Disclaimer ----------------------------- This package does neither claim to be complete or correct in any sense, nor to be a production suite for serious MC studies (because of the performance hit inside a VM), but to be an educational tool to get to know the basics of generators, Rivet+AGILe for generator steering and validation as well as Professor for tuning. We can not give any warranty but try our best to make this useful for anyone. 6. Contact --------------------------- For any problems with any package, please contact the authors of them. For problems with or helpful suggestions about this VM, please contact me directly weyh(at)physik(dot)hu-berlin(dot)de or the mailing lists: rivet(at)projects(dot)hepforge(dot)org professor(at)projects(dot)hepforge(dot)org