Training of the MC Production contacts

Introduction

Pantelis Kontaxakis (University of Geneva), Juraj Smieško (CERN)

CERN, 13/3-005

21 October 2026

Autumn 2026 campaign

  • First FCC-ee MC production campaign running on the distributed production system DIRAC/iLCDirac
  • Planned to start in the middle of November
  • The whole campaign runs with one Key4hep stack release, fixed once the campaign starts
  • Baseline
    • Fast (parametrized) simulation with Delphes
    • Full simulation with CLD
  • Dataset requests are collected in the DRS — selecting the Physics group notifies its MC Production contact(s)

The MC Production tools are heavily in flux — be prepared for changes in your workflow

Workflow

DRS → DIRAC/iLCDirac → Rucio → DaMI

  • DRS — Dataset Request System: requests, their review and approval
  • DIRAC/iLCDirac — launching and monitoring the productions on the GRID
  • Rucio — data management of the produced datasets, not covered yet
  • DaMI — publishing the datasets (former FCC Physics Events website)

Tutorials: HEP-FCC/mc-productions-tutorials

Role of the MC Production contact

  • Handle the dataset requests of your group in the DRS
    • Clarify the requests with the requesters, avoid duplicates
    • Physics approval by the MC contact(s) of the group, Resources approval by the DRS admins
  • Prepare the production configuration and submit it with iLCDirac
    • Record the transformation IDs in the request — one per process and step
  • Validate the produced datasets
    • No common procedure yet, up to each MC contact for now
  • Publish the validated datasets in DaMI — inserted by hand (or script) for now
    • EOS path: /eos/experiment/fcc/prod + transformation LFN

Today

16:00IntroductionJuraj
16:10GRID certificate and FCC VO registrationJuraj/Birgit
16:25DRS: registration and managing dataset requestsPantelis
17:00Break
17:10Launching productions with DIRAC/iLCDiracJuraj
17:55Publishing the datasets in DaMIPantelis
18:15Discussion: DaMI metadata fields
  • Roles granted during the training: DRS coordinator, DaMI editor
  • Please check in fcc-auth.cern.ch that you are in the fcc_prod group and that your iLCDirac nickname is set

Communication

  • Mattermost — private channel MC Production Contacts, adding you now
  • FCCSW forum — Distributed Computing category, for questions about the productions
  • MC production e-group — fcc-ped-softwareandcomputing-mcproduction@cern.ch
  • Tutorials — contributions and corrections welcome

Any help is welcome — especially with the tooling, but also with the tutorials/documentation