Welcome to Birmingham. The first thing to do is read the guide to the local system. This will teach you how to use the computer system in Birmingham and how to get a Grid Certificate. If you have any problems/queries regarding the computer system get in touch with Lawrie Lowe at

Here is a (probably incomplete) list of things you should try and do in your first week of the PhD? :

• Meet Nige.
• Meet Cristina.
• Get a key for the office.
• Get a Grid Certificate.
• Register as an external LHCb member. https://account.cern.ch/account/Externals/RegisterAccount.aspx
• Complete university paperwork (important for getting paid).
• Complete teaching contract (again, important for getting paid).
• Register for MPAGS modules: http://mpags.nottingham.ac.uk/mpags/

Once you are officially a member of LHCb, you can log into lxplus, which is a computing system used at CERN. Open up a terminal window and type:

ssh -X user@lxplus5.cern.ch

The -X option allows you to open new windows from that session, and the lxplus5 specifies that you want to use Scientific Linux 5 (slc5) as apposed to slc6 which is available but not yet fully supported.

-- JamesMccarthy - 11 Nov 2012