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 Mark Slater.

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

• Meet Nige.
• Get a key for the office (stores).
• Get a Grid Certificate.
  • Talk to Mark Slater about how to get it
• 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@lxplus.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 opposed to slc6 which is available but not yet fully supported.

Once you are in you can start to work your way through the LHCb Software Tutorials here . Start with the general tutorials and then try the Ganga and DaVinci tutorials. These will be enough to get started on a physics analysis.

Starter Kit

In recent years a new addition to LHCb has been the Starter Kit which is workshop held at CERN aiming to get all new members familiar with the main software, it is highly recommended you partake in this workshop which is usually held in the autumn, information can be found https://lhcb.github.io/starterkit-lessons/. The tutorials found on this page are far easier to digest compared to the older DaVinci tutorials described above and give advice on how to obtain data from the grid and get started.

-- JamesMccarthy - 11 Nov 2012