ATLASWatchMan - A quick general description

The Main Idea

ATLASWatchMan was designed and developed to ease the implementation of new analysis and their integration within the official ATLAS software framework Athena.

The main idea was to have a simple tool, highly automated, to get reliable analysis code and plots ready to be run in a less error prone way [Fig. 1]

Fig. 1 The main idea that led to ATLASWatchMan development

The implementation

ATLASWatchMan takes as input a Steering File, a simple file containing definitions for the analysis the user want to run. As output he gets the analysis code automatically generated together with the jobOption files to run it within the ATLAS framework.

To run the generated analysis code, locally or on the Grid, the user can use the scripts that ATLASWatchMan dinamically generate. The output is an D3PD, a plain ROOT file containing the output of all the analyses the user enetered in the steering file.

In a same steering file the user can define as many analyses/channels as he/her wants. For each of them he/she can specify object selection cuts (as minimum transverse momentum (pT) required for a muon to be considered as a "good" muon), overlap removal cuts (cuts aimed to take care double-reconstructed objects, like jets and electrons) and event selection cuts to select those events whose particles and quantities satisfy the requirements of the intended analysis.

ATLASWatchMan makes use of another tool for plotting, PlotROOT. Using this the user can also get plots from his/her analysis.

ATLASWatchMan is a collection of scripts and classes, perfectly integrated within Athena. It can be run locally on Athena itself and via the light ARA framework: or it can be run on the Grid.

Actually the submitting of the jobs to the Grid is eased a lot by ATLASWatchMan, that provides to automatically generate "launching tools" from the user settings defined in the steering file. Two tools are generated, one using Panda, mainly for US Grid, and one using Ganga, mainly for EU Grid.

-- RiccardoMariaBianchi - 27 Jan 2009