Part I. Tutorials

The tutorials presented here cover a range of topics, but they have in common that they are all based on software run with ATHENA, and they all utilize ASK. The intend is that ASK provides enough of a buffer to be able to run the tutorials over a variety of Atlas releases. If you find otherwise, you should report it: <WLavrijsen@lbl.gov>, to make sure it gets fixed.

Important notice

This tutorial is "physically" part of the ASK documentation, and it will use that tool in most of the steps outlined below. However, nothing that is presented here depends on ASK per se, and it is certainly possible to use the "standard" Atlas tools directly to achieve the same results, since ASK operates completely in user-space: it performs tasks that are otherwise left to you, the end-user. If you so choose to bypass ASK, please be advised that you are better off when you send any requests for support directly to the respective package authors. The text in this tutorial may seem pedantic at times, but based on feedback from users, I think this is the appropriate level. If you have run Atlas software before, you will feel every so often that I'm stating the obvious and you should just skip those parts.

Some of the tutorials, in particular Chapter 4, Simulation tutorial, may require more disk space than you have available in, say, your home directory at CERN. Possible solutions to this problem include:

Once you have successfully run one or more of the tutorials, you will have a properly setup environment from where you can continue working, with or without ASK, and you will have log files that you can use for reference. Furthermore, many terms in the tutorial are linked through to a glossary which, besides giving short explanations, has links to web-sites and recipes for all of the individual steps. This approach follows the way most people tend to work: one takes a working environment from a colleague, bugs her for more information, and then starts going/learning through perturbation.