pybes3

pybes3 is a Python module that aims to make BES3 users easier to work with Python.

Tip

If you have any suggestions, questions, or issues, please feel free to open an issue.

It is highly recommended to take a look at these Python modules before using pybes3:

• awkward: A Python module that can handle ragged-like array.
• uproot: A ROOT I/O Python module. pybes3 uses uproot to read BES3 ROOT files.

Visit the documentation for more information about installation, usage, and examples.

Installation

Note

pybes3 requires Python 3.9 or higher.

Install pybes3 using pip

python3 -m pip install pybes3

Users on lxlogin server

"lxlogin server" means the login server of computation clusters of IHEP. If you are not using lxlogin server, you can skip this section.

Since there is a quota limitation on the user's home directory (~/), you need to create symlinks for ~/.local and ~/.cache, which contain pip packages and caches installed in "user mode":

# Check whether a `.local` directory and `.cache` already exists.
# If so, move it to somewhere else.
ls -a ~
mv ~/.local /path/to/somewhere/
mv ~/.cache /path/to/somewhere

# If no `.local` or `.cache` exists, create them
mkdir /path/to/somewhere/.local
mkdir /path/to/somewhere/.cache

# After moving or creating them, link them back to `~`
ln -s /path/to/somewhere/.local ~/.local
ln -s /path/to/somewhere/.cache ~/.cache

Using pybes3 under BOSS8 environment

If you are using pybes3 under BOSS8 environment, you MUST run following commands after setting up BOSS8 environment:

export PYTHONPATH=`python -m site --user-site`:$PYTHONPATH
export PATH=`python -m site --user-base`/bin:$PATH

Warning

DO NOT add these commands to your shell configuration file (e.g. ~/.bashrc), since they will conflict with the default python environment (without BOSS8).

Features

At the moment, pybes3 provides:

• BES3 data reading: Read rtraw, rec, dst, and even raw files.

• Identifier: Convert BOSS detector identifier number to a human-readable format.

• Indexing: Each detector element in pybes3 is assigned a zero-based index, useful for array indexing and mapping detector elements.

• Geometry: Retrieve and compute geometry information of detectors.

• Helix operations: Parse and transform helix parameters.

Performance

pybes3 is designed to be fast and efficient. It uses C++ to accelerate some of the operations, such as helix operations, detector identifier conversion, etc.

Data reading

A simple benchmark is provided to compare the performance of pybes3 and BOSS8 in reading dst files:

• For pybes3, we directly read out the Event tree:

  import uproot
  import pybes3
  
  n_evt = ... # number of events to read
  files = [...] # list of ROOT files to read
  
  data_array = uproot.concatenate({f: "Event" for f in files}, entry_stop=n_evt)

• For BOSS8, since when reading reconstruction data, it will load a RecMakerAlg algorithm for each event, which slows down the reading performance significantly (4~5 times slower than pure reading), we test 2 cases:

  • A loop on all events with default job-options (with RecMakerAlg algorithm):

    #include "$ROOTIOROOT/share/jobOptions_ReadRec.txt"
    #include "$OFFLINEEVENTLOOPMGRROOT/share/OfflineEventLoopMgr_Option.txt"
    
    EventCnvSvc.digiRootInputFile = { ... }; // list of ROOT files to read
    ApplicationMgr.EvtMax = ...; // number of events to read
    MessageSvc.OutputLevel = 7; // suppress messages
    

  • A loop on all events without loading RecMakerAlg algorithm. This is similar to reading rtraw files and is the closest case to raw ROOT reading:

    ApplicationMgr.ExtSvc += {"EvtPersistencySvc/EventPersistencySvc"};
    ApplicationMgr.ExtSvc +={"RootEvtSelector/EventSelector","RootCnvSvc/EventCnvSvc"};
    EventPersistencySvc.CnvServices += {"EventCnvSvc"};
    #include "$OFFLINEEVENTLOOPMGRROOT/share/OfflineEventLoopMgr_Option.txt"
    
    EventCnvSvc.digiRootInputFile = { ... }; // list of ROOT files to read
    ApplicationMgr.EvtMax = ...; // number of events to read
    MessageSvc.OutputLevel = 7; // suppress messages
    

The machine used for the benchmark is a Intel i7-12700 with Great Wall GW7000 4TB SSD. The operating system is AlmaLinuxOS9 on WSL2. The number of events is set to 1000, 5000, 10000, 50000, 100000, 500000, and 1000000.

The results are shown below:

The fitting results with a linear function is:

	Initialization time (s)	Slope (s/10k-event)
BOSS8 (with RecMakerAlg)	0.615	2.766
BOSS8 (no RecMakerAlg)	0.451	0.338
pybes3	1.135	0.326

The result shows that pybes3 is also comparable to BOSS8 when RecMakerAlg is not loaded, which means that the reading performance of pybes3 is close to the reading performance of ROOT itself. pybes3 is several times faster than BOSS8 with default settings, and slower when reading small number of events (~1000), since the module importing and initialization time is counted in the benchmark.

Since users may have to use the default settings of BOSS to read reconstruction data, pybes3 is still several times faster in this case.