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.

Useful Tips, Tricks and Resources

• tmux - This is a useful command that creates a terminal environment that allows for multiple tabs and panes to be used in one terminal window. You can leave things running in a tmux session then "detach" it which will leave it running in the background even if you log out and turn your laptop off, making it very useful indeed. A general cheatsheet can be found here.

• LHCb Glossary - This is a website made by LHCb to summarise terms that are commonly used within LHCb and HEP generally. A useful place to go if you don't know what an acronym stands for.

• bash profiles - If you are running linux, you can use the bash_profile or bashrc file to customise your working environment in your terminal. This can be from minor things like creating aliases to common locations or commands with arguments or appearance modifications. There are plenty of people online that share what they include in their profiles so you can see if any are useful to you.
  • e.g. a function to easily renew the $DISPLAY environment variable to allow for images to be viewed over ssh (using evince for example on a pdf) when in a tmux session that has been detached and reattached with a new login:

             function display(){
                 if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
                      export DISPLAY="`tmux show-env | sed -n 's/^DISPLAY=//p'`"
                 else
                       export DISPLAY=localhost:$1
                 fi
             }

-- JamesMccarthy - 11 Nov 2012