Summary and Schedule

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.

	Setup Instructions	Download files required for the lesson
Duration: 00h 00m	1. Introduction	What is the point of these exercises? How do I find the data I want to work with? Once I’ve found the data, what do I do with them?
Duration: 00h 10m	2. Where are the datasets?	Where do I find datasets for data and Monte Carlo?
Duration: 00h 20m	3. What data and Monte Carlo are available?	What data and run periods are available? What data do the collision datasets contain? What Monte Carlo samples are available?
Duration: 00h 35m	4. How to access metadata on the command line?	What is cernopendata-client? How to use cernopendata-client container image? How to get the list of files in a dataset on the command line?
Duration: 00h 50m	5. What is in the datafiles?	How do I inspect these files to see what is in them?
Duration: 01h 00m	6. Finding and exploring a NanoAOD dataset	How do we find a specific nanoAOD dataset on the CERN Open Data Portal? How do we use cernopendata-client to get file locations for a dataset? How do we explore the content of a nanoAOD simulation file?
Duration: 01h 35m	Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.

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.