Teaching the Grid to ATLAS

At the tutorial, about 20 UK-funded members of the collaboration were shown how to harness the computing power of the WLCG efficiently and responsibly, to do their physics analysis. With LHC collisions now expected in late 2009 the need to educate physicists from all of the experiments in the use of Grid technologies increasingly urgent; analysis of such enormous quantities of data will simply not be tractable without distributed computing.

Everyone from new PhD students to established members of the collaboration worked through a series of prepared exercises, assisted and advised by a group of experts from the UK and other ATLAS member-states. The topics covered included the AMI and DDM tools, used to locate and access the data on the Grid; the ELSSI interface to the TAG database, used to identify specific events for analysis; and finally the GANGA system for submitting analysis jobs to the Grid and retrieving the results.

The tools performed very well and most of the attendees were able to complete the exercises. Being in the same room as several distributed computing experts for two days meant that those attending were able to ask many questions, and left with a much clearer view about how their analyses will proceed when data arrives. A coincidental benefit were the many side-discussions that were possible between both tutors and attendees; a lot of work was done in those two days! The whole event proceeded smoothly in large part due to the excellent facilities and helpful staff at NeSC.

The feedback from the meeting was very positive. It is now hoped that those who attended will disseminate this information to others in their institutes.