With the graduate students all really busy with thesis-writing and/or course finals, we decided not to meet on Dec.10 and instead mail out a little progress-report from the simulation group, who had a very successful week.


Margret managed to implement a Geant4 event display into the athena simulation of the testbeam.

She also changed the jobOptions to a more up-to-date particle generator and implemented (xyz) as the coordinate system of the particle generator source. (In the early athena version had the atlas vertex as the origin and then the eta and phi ranges determined the point of impact on the detector)

All of this is running now with the 2002 testbeam geometry as well as the "original" 2004 geometry. Furthermore, the 2004 geometry now also includes the FCAL. This was a bit of a challenge, because some of the code did not work properly. Margret applied a temporary fix, which at least lets us run and work on the code, while Mohsen at Carleton is trying to find out from Peter Loch how the problem can be fixed properly. This is really an issue for FCAL insiders.

As we are all scrambling to learn our way around running the testbeam simulation in athena, Pof has been jumping onto the bandwagon as well and already contributed: His desktop computer now runs scientific linux. He installed athena 9.0.2 on it (using Ian's automated install-script) and running the athena validation kit on this installation produced error-free results!

He has also written a script which helps the user to set up a proper working environment for working with a local Uvic atlas installation. The script can be found here

The script to set up the environment (and optionally build the package) is called myathena.sh. Once you downloaded it you type:

source myathena.sh new -> builds a new package
source myathena.sh -> sets up the environment (package must already exist)


Ian has reinstalled athena 9.0.2 after a major bug-fix for that release. Somewhat frustrated with the amount of time and detail required to do perform such an install, he has automated a number of things.
Ian's script to install the athena kit is called getrelease.sh and it is located under same path as Pof's script.

Ian has setup nightly automatic mirroring of the CERN pacman cache to UVic using the traffic minimizing rsync. This will enable an install of a new release to happen in well under an hour rather then 3-5 hours. It will also enable quick install of the entire distribution kit onto laptops and other machines (SL machines) to be done over the LAN rather then causing several gigabytes of network traffic to CERN. The contents of the pacman cache can be viewed here