The Athena Startup Kit

The Athena Startup Kit (ask), is an interactive front-end to the Atlas software framework (athena). Written in python, a very effective “glue” language, it is build on top of the, in principle unrelated, code repository, build, configuration, debug, binding, and analysis tools. Ask automates many error-prone tasks that are otherwise left to the end-user, thereby pre-empting a whole category of potential problems. Through the existing tools, which ask will setup for the user if and as needed, it locates available resources, maintains job coherency, manages the run-time environment, allows for interactivity and debugging, and provides standalone execution scripts. An end-user who wants to run her own analysis algorithms within the standard environment can let ask generate the appropriate skeleton package, the needed dependencies and run-time, as well as a default job options script. For new and casual users, ask comes with a graphical user interface; for advanced users, ask has a scriptable command line interface. Both are built on top of the same set of libraries. Ask does not need to be, and isn’t, experiment neutral. Thus it has built-in workarounds for known gotcha’s, that would otherwise be a major time-sink for each and every new user. Ask minimizes the overhead for those physicists in Atlas who just want to write and run their analysis code.