LesHouches package
--Generic Interface for Les Houches Accord at CDF offline software.

Last updated: Mon Jan 23 19:01:27 CST 2006
Frequently asked Questions and Answer
  • What is safety factor?
  • Because PYTHIA and HERWIG generate the events until being the given number of events. For example, when we set 100 events for the total number of events, PYTHIA and HERWIG make exactly 100 events even if PYTHIA and HERWIG failed to produce events somewhere. This feature is different from those of the detector simulation. In the detector simulation, when we apply 100 events, if the simulation fails 1 event, we get 99 events in the end.

    The safety factor is applied to avoid to simulate the same event twice. For example, when we simulate 100 events from ME generator with two run number, we have

    50 events for run#1

    50 events for run#2 .

    The first 50 events are read from the input file of the ME generator, and then the last 50 events are read from the input file. The first events to read for each run are 1 and 51, respectively. If PYTHIA/HERWIG fails producing 1 event in run #1, PYTHIA/HERWIG tries to read the next event, and ends up to 51th event.

    But the 51th event is already assigned in the run#2.

    And the 51th event is simulated twice.

    Each job with each run works as independent process. (for CAF jobs.) Thus, I can not handle when this error happens. Instead of producing 50 events each, I put the interval between runs.

    49 events for run#1 ( 1 -- 49)

    49 events for run#2 (52 -- 100)

    The first events to read for each run are 1 and 52, respectively. Even if events are failed, the same event is not simulated twice until the number of errors is 3 in run#1. This interval is the safety factor which I set.

    The fraction of this failure is very small for PYTHIA, but large for HERWIG. The current code sets the safety factor as 5% in each run.


    Questions : Soushi Tsuno
    e-mail : tsuno@fnal.gov
    ex. : 2310 (FNAL office)
    telephone: (+81)86-251-7817 (Okayama, Japan)
    facsimile: (+81)86-251-7830