Request procedure
In order to use MC in analyses, it must be produced centrally in ATLAS (this is actually required by our policies). Following the MC validation procedure described above, requests must be submitted for central production. Each physics group has individuals responsible for managing MC production requests and provides specific instructions for approving and submitting requests.
The MC request procedure is designed to have multiple people confirm that the validation is showing the correct physics process and to give group conveners the opportunity to decide on the computing resources to allocate to the production.
Generally, the procedure requires approval from a physics group or subgroup, the creation of a JIRA ticket, the registration of the JOs on gitlab, and finally job submission to the central production system.
Each physics and combined performance group has one or more contacts that are responsible for MC validation and sample requests. Each group should list their contacts on their twiki page. Alternatively, the complete list of contacts can be found on the PMG twiki page.
The specific request instructions for many physics groups can be found at:
The new page for the HIGP group is still being set up. For now, you can refer to the old pages. Be sure to tag all the relevant conveners and MC production contacts in your JIRA tickets!
If your physics or CP group does not provide specific instructions, you can follow the general instructions from PMG (Physics Modeling Group):
Notes about the production system
The ATLAS MC production system splits a production request into multiple
jobs that are run in parallel for improved efficiency. By default, the
minimum number of events each job is set to produce is 10000. In some cases
where event generation is slow, however, this can result in jobs taking
abnormally long (individual jobs are expected to finish in about 10 hours
or less). In such cases, it is important to reduce this minimum number of
events per job. To reduce the number to, e.g., 5000 events, add the following
line to your JOs in the evgenConfig block:
evgenConfig.nEventsPerJob = 5000
The setting must be a factor of 10000: 500 is allowed, but 499 is not.