Monte Carlo production of proton-proton collision events using the ATLAS@Home framework

Abstract: The ATLAS@Home project is a volunteer computing project, part of the larger LHC@Home project, aimed at using the computational power of personal computers from volunteers around the globe, who are interested in helping with the particle physics research taking place at the ATLAS experiment at LHC. Up this point it runs only ATLAS detector simulation tasks. This thesis explores the possibility of having the full generation of large Monte Carlo samples performed on this platform after laying the theoretical physics groundwork and introducing the concepts and elements used by this platform. Such a task has not been attempted so far but with the computational resources increasingly limited for such tasks, due to the large amounts of data the LHC produces nowadays, the need for additional non-dedicated resources, such as those offered by ATLAS@Home, is increasing. The study explores that possibility using reference Monte Carlo samples and tests whether their generation can be reliably reproduced on the virtual machine used by the project and other environments such as the Grid and a local cluster. It also tests whether the generation and derivation of the simulation data in an, appropriate and readable by commonly used analysis software, file format can occur in a single Grid task submission (as ATLAS@Home should operate as a Grid site as well from where the tasks are picked up and where the output files return upon generation), without storing and transferring heavy, intermediate generation files during this process. The study succeeds in meeting those conditions for the samples tested and proceeds to the succesful submission of a number of such tasks to a test project, running parallel to ATLAS@Home for such new kinds of submissions, with plans, in the near future, to have such tasks running on the main application.