RivetMCnet studentships!Would you like to work on a short project involving Monte Carlo event generators? MCnet offers 3-6 month fully funded studentships for current PhD students. See montecarlonet.org for more information! The Rivet project (Robust Independent Validation of Experiment and Theory) is a toolkit for validation of Monte Carlo event generators. Using an computationally efficient model for observable computations (known as the "projections" system), Rivet provides a set of experimental analyses useful for generator sanity checks, as well as a convenient infrastructure for adding your own analyses. Rivet's design emphasises the separation between HepMC records and where they came from, allowing it to be a completely cross-generator validation platform. Also emphasised is the avoidance of hard-coding reference data or histogram binnings in the analysis code: Rivet provides functions to extract this information from bundled data files, meaning that it is much easier to keep reference and generated data synchronised. Combined with AGILe, Rivet is an object oriented C++ replacement for the venerable HZTool/HZSteer system. 2010-03-23: Rivet release 1.2.1The long-awaited 1.2 series of Rivet adds many new analyses, bug-fixes to many existing ones, and many more improvements and features to the system. The analysis and plotting "metadata" system has been primarily moved from the code to external data files, making analysis code more lightweight; the run energy is now known at the initialisation phase, also making analysis code shorter and more comprehensible for multi-energy analyses; the analysis plugin mechanism is much less intrusive than before; and most hard-coded normalisations have been removed, having been replaced by a post-processing script for flexible rescalings and normalisations. This latter point means that cross-section information in input HepMC records is now highly recommended, and we encourage all users to use HepMC 2.05 and higher for this reason. In the interests of quality control, all analyses have been re-validated and marked as such. Analyses currently considered unvalidated are relegated to a plugin library not built by default. There are currently 63 validated analyses, covering many areas of generator validation and including all the reference analyses currently in use for general-purpose MC generator tuning. Note that the paths searched for analysis plugins (libraries of the form Rivet*.so) are now specified solely by the RIVET_ANALYSIS_PATH variable, or the Rivet install lib directory if unset. Rivet 1.2.1 is a patch release on Rivet 1.2.0, which fixes a number of bugs, in particular in the FastJets projection, adds a new MissingMomentum projection for use in place of the rather confusing TotalVisibleMomentum projection, and improves some code details to make Rivet compile cleanly with the -Wextra flag set. Rivet 1.2.1 is recommended for immediate production use. A manual – documenting use of the system, the standard analyses, and the underlying mechanisms – is available in the tarball, on this website, and on the arXiv. Please let us know your experiences using Rivet 1.2, send us your analysis code to be included in future releases, and suggest improvements by emailing us at rivet@NOSPAMprojects.hepforge.org
More information on the status of the project, as well as a more detailed description and documentation, can be found via the links on the left. |