Monte-Carlo Facility
An important service which can be provided by the Regional Centres
is the Monte-Carlo simulation. It is estimated that one needs
roughly 100k events per physics channel and one single event requires
approximately 100k MIPS-s. One can see with the help of these numbers that the
Monte-Carlo simulation is a relatively CPU-intense process which will impose
very modest demands on network access. The size of a Monte-Carlo event in the
raw data format is estimated to be around 2 Mbytes. It therefore, requires
a Regional centre to have good CPU power and large data storage to function
as a Monte-Carlo facility. On the other hand, the financial and manpower
requirements for a regional centre performing only simulation are likely to
be modest.
For any Monte-Carlo production facility one should consider the following:
1. A repository of all Event Generators available in the market should
be kept in all the regional centres.
2. An important aspect of MC production is the tunning of an event generator.
A regional centre should have people qualified to do this job, because it
requires a insight of physics as well as of the detector.
3. Managing the Monte Carlo Software, which involves testing that the
simulation runs correctly on all CMS-supported platforms.
4. A Regional Centre should be able to accommodate some user sessions, including
some running analysis on the Centre's facilities.
5. It should also support a moderate amount of data transfer over the
network.
6. It should provide a good network management, so making sure that the data
is accessible at all times.
7. An extermely good Bookkeeping Software is required for the Monte-Carlo
Production. The past experience tells us that one should start with a
well-defined method for bookkeeing otherwise things which are developed as
they needed normally provide a quick-n-dirty solution.
8. A full Monte-Carlo simulation which is normally complete but slow is
usually accompanied by a fast version as already the case in CMS. For tunning
both the slow and fast Monte-Carlo will be a major task and a regional centre
should take active part in this activity.
February 5, 1998
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