In October 2019, the first FCC Software Workshop and Hands-on Tutorial was held at CERN by the EP-SFT group in collaboration with the FCC study coordination group. Following its success a second edition was held during the last FCC physics workshop (January 2020). The purpose of these events is to introduce to the participants the status and plans of the FCC Software and the current use of it. The workshops offered a complete overview of the FCC software and the status of the major components.

The first FCC Software Workshop in October was structured with half a day of technical overview and talks on specific components on the afternoon of the first day, and hands-on exercises during the entire second day. It included talks on specific components such as the well known Gaudi framework, developed and used by LHCb and ATLAS and on which FCCSW is based, and DD4hep, a tool for geometry description developed in the context of the AIDA 2020 programme and use of which is continuously expanding. A session on Monte Carlo generators followed, focusing in particular on those more relevant for the FCC-ee studies.

Moreover, Staszek Jadach accepted the invitation to overview the KKMC and TAUOLA generator tools; these programs originated from the LEP studies and, despite the fact that they will need to be significantly improved for FCC-ee, are still today the best options for precision studies at future lepton colliders. An overview of the end-user analysis tools closed the first day.

Tentative schematic of the different components entering the design of the FCC Software.

Schematic overview of a typical workflow of the FCC Software.

The second day was dedicated to hands-on exercises. A set of tutorials was prepared to drive the participants through a full example of the analysis workflow, the usage of fast simulation, the evaluation of the performance of a given calorimetric solution and the full simulation of the IDEA drift chamber. The tutorial exercises were initially run on the CERN SWAN facility and then on LXPLUS. A CernVM-based virtual machine, specialised for the FCC software was also made available and could be used for the exercises.

At leptonic colliders the Higgs-boson will be dominantly produced by Higgs stralhung from a Z-boson, the so called ZH production mode. As the of center of mass energy is known, it is thus possible to calculate the HIggs-boson mass from the recoiling reconstructed objects of the Z-boson candidate. This plot shows the recoiling mass after having selected a Z-boson decaying to a pair of muons (Credis: FCC collaboration).

Following this workshop, a one-day hands on tutorial was organized during the 3rd FCC physics meeting (January 2020) as it was a perfect occasion to discuss how to prioritize the needs in terms of software development. Discussions focussed on the FCC-ee software as the needs for a future hadron collider (FCC-hh) may be delayed to profit from lessons and synergies with the HL-LHC software development community.

Schematic of the overall proposed FCC-hh detector. (Credits: FCC collaboration) 

Both events were well attended, bringing together more than 30 participants thus reflecting the community's interest in these developments. A feedback form, circulated among the participants, indicated a high level of appreciation for these initiatives while precious suggestions for improvements have been received, in particular for the hands-on tutorials.

To respond to a popular request of the FCC community, more editions of hands-on exercise sessions are planned this year.