OPAL was one of the major particle physics experiments at CERN. OPAL studied particles and their interactions by collecting and analyzing electron-positron collision events at LEP, the Large Electron-Positron collider.

The OPAL experiment and the LEP collider started operation in August 1989. Data taking finally ended on November 2, 2000.

Computing Environment

The OPAL computing environment is availabale using CernVM. The virtual machine environment can be created by running CernVM with the cloud-init user data file for opal: opal.yaml. It will be easiest to run the CernVM on the CERN OpenStack, for more information consider these websites: cern.ch/cernvm and cern.ch/clouddocs. Some instructions for the use of the cloud-init user data is imbedded in the file, look though the file.

The virtual machine configured by the cloud-init user data lets you connect to eos to access the experiment data. The software environment for the experimnet is provided using cvmfs. You need to run the VM in a context where it can access these services.