pythia-mill

Small library to launch pythia event generation in parallel.

Pythia8 installation

PythiaMill depends on external installation of Pythia8. Pythia8 can be downloaded at Pythia web site.

In order to get a build compatible with PythiaMill, Pythia8 should be compiled with some specific flags (alternatively, change PythiaMill compile flags in setup.py); The following configure options are, most probably, do the trick:

./configure --cxx-common='-Ofast -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 -std=c++98 -pedantic -W -Wall -Wshadow -fPIC' \
  --cxx-shared='-Ofast -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 -std=c++98 -pedantic -W -Wall -Wshadow -fPIC -shared' \
  --enable-shared --prefix=<place to install pythia>

Only two options are different from the default flags: -Ofast (-O2 by default) and -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 (absent by default):

• -Ofast: Pythia might get measurably faster if compiled with -03 and --fast-math (both are included into -Ofast);
• PythiaMill and Pythia must be compiled with the same value of -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI, otherwise, PythiaMill might throw errors like the one below:

undefined symbol: _ZN7Pythia86Pythia10readStringESsb

For example, pythiamill/utils/pythiautils.so might contains link (-D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0):

Pythia8::Pythia::readString(std::string, bool)

while the signature of the actual function in Pythia8.so (-D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=1) might look like:

Pythia8::Pythia::readString(std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, bool)

After configuration step, as usual:

• make;
• make install.

PythiaMill installation

PythiaMill exploits cython as a bridge between Pythia and Python. Thus, make sure that you have cython and numpy installed.

There are two options for installation:

• locally (recommended for development):

  python setup.py build_ext --inplace

  This will just compile cython and C files. To clean all: python setup.py clean --all

• as a pip package:

  pip install git+https://github.com/maxim-borisyak/pythia-mill.git@master

  or, to quickly update (e.g. to pull some changes):

  pip install --upgrade --no-deps --force-reinstall git+https://github.com/maxim-borisyak/pythia-mill.git@master

Usage

PythiaMill launches several worker processes (PythiaBlade) and collects their results.

This example pretty much illustrates the basic usage of PythiaMill:

from pythiamill import PythiaMill
from pythiamill.utils import *

options=[
  'Beams:eCM = 91.188',
  'Beams:idA =  11',
  'Beams:idB = -11',
  ...
]

if __name__ == '__main__':
  mill = PythiaMill(SDetector(10, 10), options, cache_size=4, batch_size=16, n_workers=2)
  a = mill.sample()

PythiaMill arguments:

• detector (see section Detectors);
• options to be set in Pythia (as list of Python string), see Pythia manual;
• cache_size - number of batches in circulation in the mill (completed + in progress + enqueued batches), recommended value: 2 x number of workers;
• batch_size - number of events in batch,

Detectors

For performance reasons PythiaMill allows only fixed-size output. However, raw events are lists of particles without fixed size. Additionally, event processing can be quite expensive, thus, it is more efficient if it is done in parallel.

The base class that transforms list of particles into a fixed-sized vector is called Detector.

There are currently 3 pre-installed detectors:

• pythiamill.utils.SDetector Spherical detector with a uniform grid along phi angle and specified pseudo-rapidity range.
• pythiamill.utils.STDetector Computes Sphericity(2.0, 2), Sphericity(1.0, 2) and Thrust(2) whatever it means (see Pythia manual for details).
• pythiamill.utils.TuneMCDetector Extracts features analogous to the ones from "Event generator tuning using Bayesian optimization Philip Ilten, Mike Williams, Yunjie Yang arXiv:1610.08328" paper. The major difference is that all histograms are computed for only 1 event, i.e. features from the paper can be obtained as sum of feature vectors for a number of events.

Seed

Don't forget option 'Random:seed=0'! For more information: Pythia Manual

Docker

Troubles with installation? Consult docker file.

Note PYTHIA_ADDITIONAL_FLAGS, your system might not support the default flags.