The tutorial will cover basics of Monte Carlo event generators, hands on exercise on running Pythia8 and Madgraph, an introduction to the Rivet analysis framework, and hopefully you running a simple analysis and making plots  at the end. Many of these tools are very useful for people who are doing phenomenology as well, so this is certainly not just targeted at experimentalists.

Before coming here, I would really like you to do the following steps. We will try to help you at the venue, but that might result in you missing out on some part of the tutorial. If you are stuck in one of the steps, please send an email, and we will try to help.

1. Download the virtualbox software (latest version) from here (depending on your OS):
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

2. Install.

3. Then download the virtual machine image we will be using for our tutorial session from here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uwzeb5pxqm7y26j/HEPP2016.tar.bz2?dl=0

* Please note this is almost 2 GB, so using your university network may be helpful ;)

4. Uncompress the downloaded file. In Linux and Linux-like systems, it is simply tar -xvf <filename>. For Windows, usual zip programs should work, or google.

5. Create a new machine with VirtualBox using the GUI. Click "new" from the left right corner, VirtualBox will ask for the name of the machine (pick anything) and its OS. For the latter choose Linux -> Ubuntu (32 bit). In the next step, set the size of the memory. About 1GB should be fine. In the last step, select the virtual disk. Choose 'Use an existing virtual hard drive file' and open the *.vdi file you just downloaded and extracted.

* Important: you machine needs at least 8 GB of free space.

6. Make sure the the VM starts. Username/password are student/hepp2016

Please dont hesitate to ask if you have any questions!