Setup and Running ATLAS Software

(from Ed Diehl email)

I have found in the past that the validation scripts have errors themselves, or there are other obscure problems which cause the scripts to fail even if the installation is ok. Therefore, I do not bother to run them, but rather just run ordinary Athena jobs and see what happens.

One simple check of an installation is to go into the installation directory and run "pacman -lc". This will list all the packages in the installation (94 of them for 12.0.6) which should all have a "[*]" in front of them indicating a successful installation.

Here are some instructions on how to run a simple test with Athena. If this works, I can send you scripts to do a full Athena test of particle generation, reconstruction, etc.

I assume that you have Athena 12.0.6 installed in some directory which I call . This directory has subdirectories atlas, AtlasAnalysis, AtlasConditions, etc. I picked 12.0.6 because I know my scripts should work with 12.0.6.

Create Athena setup files.

run create-cmthome.sh script. It must be run from , but does not have to be in that directory.

   $ cd <athena-installation-directory>
   $ create-cmthome.sh     
   

create-cmthome.sh creates ~/cmthome with several files in it: setup.(c)sh => Athena setup script (2 versions, depending on which shell you use). requirements => has various parameters used to define your setup. You can edit requirments to change things, but then you must re-create your setup scripts For now, use the defaults.

This step needs to be done only once for each version of Athena. To run different versions you can create multiple "cmthome" directories, one for each Athena version. These can be located anywhere, not just $HOME.

Create a "test area" to work with Athena. By default this is $HOME/testarea with subdirectories for different Athena versions.

   $ cd $HOME
   $ mkdir $HOME/testarea
   $ mkdir $HOME/testarea/AtlasOffline-12.0.6       #must use this name
   $ mkdir $HOME/testarea/AtlasOffline-12.0.6/test  #"test" can be any name 
   

Simple test - run Athena "Hello World"

   $ cd  $HOME/testarea/AtlasOffline-12.0.6/test

   #  Run Athena setup scripts (you do this each time to run Athena) $ source $HOME/cmthome/setup.csh -tag=12.0.6 $ source $AtlasArea/AtlasOfflineRunTime/cmt/setup.csh
   

(use the *.sh versions if you run Bash)

These commands should generate no errors. After they are done the command "athena" and several others are defined, as well as a bunch of environmental variables (for example AtlasArea).

Get the Athena options file called HelloWorldOptions.py which runs Athena for "Hello World". Use the Atlas software command "get_files":

   $ get_files HelloWorldOptions.py 
   

This should retrieve HelloWorldOptions.py from the Athena code repository.

Now run athena:

   $ athena HelloWorldOptions.py 
   

This should generate a bunch of "messages" of various types. If this works, I'll send you the particle generation scripts.

-- ShawnMcKee - 19 Jul 2007