Full Detector Simulation using SLIC

Overview

This tutorial shows how to obtain a full detector resource file and extract the data necessary for the full simulator. Lastly, a few simple commands are given for running the simulator in batch mode using the downloaded file.

SLIC Executables

This tutorial assumes that the SLIC binary is executed using the command slic. On your system, this will need to be substituted with the full path to the SLIC binary.

Windows

Windows users should refer to SLIC from Scratch on Windows. These instructions show how to download and use a pre-packaged binary and also give the steps for building an executable from scratch using Cygwin.

Linux

No binaries are available for Linux users, due to the large number of possible system configurations.

Follow the instructions in SLIC From Scratch on Linux to build the binaries on Linux.

Full Detector Files

The LCSim website maintains a set of full detector resource files that include the LCDD files used by the simulator.

A list of available full detectors is maintained at this URL:

http://www.lcsim.org/detectors/taglist.txt 

Resource packs for individual detectors are available at standard URLs by tag:

http://www.lcsim.org/detectors/[tag].zip

For instance, the zip file for the cdcaug05 detector is located at the URL:

http://www.lcsim.org/detectors/cdcaug05.zip

Linux users can use the wget command to obtain this:

wget http://www.lcsim.org/detectors/cdcaug05.zip

If wget is not available, simply copy the URL into a browser and save the file to the local disk.

The zip file contains the LCDD XML file required by SLIC.

If the unzip command is available on your system, use a command like the following to extract the LCDD file to the current directory, substituting the name of the detector for tag:

unzip [tag].zip -C [tag].lcdd

To extract cdcaug05's LCDD file, use this command:

unzip cdcaug05.zip -C cdcaug05.lcdd

Windows XP users can view the zip file as a compressed folder.

It should look something like this.

To extract the LCDD file from the archive, simply drag it into your working directory.

Running a Full Detector Simulation

Now that the full detector geometry file has been obtained, standard SLIC commands can be used to run a simulation job.

This is the general (minimalistic) command for running a simulation, where tag should be the name of the LCDD file, stdhep_file is the path to a binary StdHep input file, and num_to_run is the number of events to be simulated.

slic -g [tag].lcdd -i [stdhep_file] -r [num_to_run]

For instance, this command will run 1000 events on cdcaug05 using the input file events.stdhep.

slic -g cdcaug05.lcdd -i events.stdhep -r 1000

StdHep files are available within the ILC FTP directory hierarchy.