Instructor Notes

This tutorial teaches learners how to find and access EIC/ePIC simulation campaign data with Rucio and xrootd. It assumes learners have already completed the Setting Up Your EIC Environment tutorial and have a working eic-shell.

Before the session

  • Ask learners to have a working eic-shell ready in advance (see the Setup page). The Rucio client is run from inside eic-shell.
  • Confirm that learners can run rucio whoami from inside eic-shell before the live commands, so that authentication issues are caught early.
  • Remind learners that campaigns older than ~6 months may not be directly accessible, so use a recent software_release/campaign when demonstrating the did list commands live.

Timing

The lesson is short on teaching (~35 minutes) but the exercises (particularly the use cases in the final episode) can absorb the rest of the time as learners explore the tag-based queries and stream or download files.

Common pitfalls

  • DIDs look like file paths but are flat; learners frequently expect a hierarchy that is not there.
  • Metadata tags are only applied from March 2026 onwards, so tag-based filtering will miss older datasets.
  • Encourage streaming rather than downloading full datasets.