Running an Event Display with EDM4hep or LCIO input

It is possible to run the C Event Display (CED) via a wrapped CEDViewer Marlin Processor. This makes it possible to run the Event Display with EDM4hep input files using an on the fly conversion to LCIO for CED. This introduction shows the basic concepts and also provides a options file that should work for most use cases. This example will be using the CLIC detector but should also work for other DD4hep detector models. The example is fully self contained, if you already have everything set up you can jump directly to running the event display.

Setting up an environment

The following steps have been tested with the Key4hep nightly builds release which can be setup using

source /cvmfs/sw-nightlies.hsf.org/key4hep/setup.sh

To get the CLIC detector description we clone the CLICPerformance repository

git clone https://github.com/iLCSoft/CLICPerformance

All the following steps assume that the environment is setup like above and that the detector description is in the CLICPerformance directory. All commands start from the directory from which git clone has been executed.

Creating an input file

To create an input file for the event display we run a simple detector simulation using ddsim and a particle gun that shoots photons. The input file that we create here for illustration purposes has only 10 events, which also means that the creation should only take a few minutes. The steps to create this file are the following

ddsim --steeringFile CLICPerformance/clicConfig/clic_steer.py \
      --compactFile $K4GEO/CLIC/compact/CLIC_o3_v14/CLIC_o3_v14.xml \
      --enableGun \
      --gun.distribution uniform \
      --gun.particle gamma \
      --gun.energy 10*GeV \
      --outputFile gamma_10GeV_edm4hep.root \
      --numberOfEvents 10

You should now have a gamma_10GeV_edm4hep.root file containing 10 events.

Running the event display

In order to run the event display via the DDCEDViewer we use the Marlin wrapper. Here we simply present the most important steps, but do not go over all details of the DDCEDViewer configuration, for that it is probably best to directly look at the CEDViewer repository directly. The complete Gaudi configuration can be found in k4MarlinWrapper/examples/event_display.py which is also installed at $K4MARLINWRAPPER/examples/event_display.py

In order to run the event display we first have to start the glced server program to which the wrapped CEDViewer processor will then connect. Starting the server and running the wrapped processor can be done via

glced &

k4run $K4MARLINWRAPPER/examples/event_display.py --inputFiles=gamma_10GeV_edm4hep.root

If you want to run the event display for a different geometry you can do so with the --compactFile argument. However, depending on your detector model you might also need to change some of the DDCEDViewer parameters. The default compact file is "CLICPerformance/Visualisation/CLIC_o3_v06_CED/CLIC_o3_v06_CED.xml".

Details

The main work is done by the DDCEDViewer, which we use via the MarlinProcessorWrapper. It is the following part of example event_display.py.

from Configurables import MarlinProcessorWrapper

MyCEDViewer = MarlinProcessorWrapper("MyCEDViewer")
MyCEDViewer.ProcessorType = "DDCEDViewer"
MyCEDViewer.Parameters = {
                          # ... lots of CEDViewer configuration ...
                          }

Some of the more commonly used parameters have self explanatory names.

Troubleshooting / Using other detectors

When running this for a detector different than CLD, CLIC or ILD (or a derivative of one of them) you might not see anything in the event display.

If you are not seeing the detector make sure that it has the proper visualisation attributes, e.g. by comparing it to the compact file used above. If you are not seeing any hits, tracks etc. from your event, make sure to add their collection names to the DrawInLayer list in the DDCEDViewer parameters.