1.3. Goals of the course

Learning Objectives

  • Understand what we’ll be doing, and why we’ll be doing it.

The FCC Tutorials are all about getting you the knowledge and tools you need to do your studies.

We want this course to give you the confidence to be able to start by yourself, to understand what the code, you’ll be writing, does and why you’re writing it, and to teach others how to do the same. Each lesson follows on the previous one, but each can also serve as a standalone reference when you need to revisit a particular topic.

We’ll be looking at:

  • How data flows through the FCC processing chain, what software is involved, and how the data is stored;

  • How the data flow is different for simulated (Monte Carlo) events;

  • Where the data ends up, how it’s indexed, and how you can find and access the data you need;

  • How to work with events in the EDM4hep data format and eventually convert it to ROOT ntuples; and

  • How to add more variables to the ntuples.

We’ll also cover how to efficiently run software locally and on the Batch System using HTCondor, as well as how to ask good questions when you’re stuck and where to ask them.

The lessons will start with a lot of explaining, but then we’ll get in to the hands-on stuff.

These lessons have been put together over the years by a lot of people who are passionate about good software practices and demystifying code. Over the course of 2015, the first version of these lessons have been written on GitHub, a code sharing and collaboration website. You can find the source code of these lessons in the HEP-FCC/fcc-tutorials repository, and you can contribute!

Please submit an issue if you spot a mistake or you think something isn’t clear enough, or you can make the changes yourself and open a pull request.

If you’re not already familiar with git, you could check out the HSF Analysis essentials course.

So, enough with the introduction, let’s dive in!