Summary and Setup

This lesson provides an introduction to CMS data on the CERN Open Data Portal. You will learn search techniques for CMS Open Data as well as how to understand the data records and access the files.

The first episodes of this lesson can be worked through in a web browser.

Episodes 4, 5, and 6 require a Python environment. This can be on a terminal on your local machine or on a server. Alternatively, you can run Python in a jupyter notebook. In this case, the Python commands will remain the same, but for shell commands marked as BASH you will have to add a ! to the beginning of the command, as demonstrated below.

Install the following packages with pip:

BASH

pip install cernopendata-client uproot awkward numpy matplotlib jupyterlab

If in the jupyter notebook:

BASH

!pip install cernopendata-client uproot awkward numpy matplotlib jupyterlab

You will also need XRootD support to stream files directly from the CERN Open Data storage. Install it with:

BASH

pip install xrootd fsspec-xrootd

A Unix terminal (Linux, macOS terminal, or Windows WSL2 Ubuntu terminal) is required for the command-line steps.