Geant4 Steering Board Meeting

11 December 2007, 08:30-12:00 CET

Present:
CERN: J.Apostolakis, W.Pokorski, H.Kurashige, M.G.Pia, G.Cosmo, V.Ivantchenko, G.Folger, I.Mclaren; A.Ribon part time invited for his report
VRVS/Phone: M.Verderi, D.Wright, J.Perl (partial due to connection problem)
Excused: H. Yoshida, T.Sasaki , M.Asai

1. Regular Issues

Approval of minutes for previous SB meeting

Draft minutes of the last SB meeting were distributed on 19 September.

Report from OB

John reported from the OB meeting. INFN is now represented by M. Morandin. John reported to the OB the manpower status for Geant4; the last count gave a total of 28 FTEs. A delta review, tentatively set for November 2008, was agreed by the OB.

M.G.Pia asked for details of the manpower numbers, breaking this into full time, permanent staff, etc. to allow accessing risks.

Action Item: J.Apostolakis to circulate FTE numbers within the SB.

Report from the Technical Forum

The minutes of the technical forum are available at minutes2007_11_07\

2. Assessment of issues affecting physics performance for key use cases

D.Wright reported on several changes and bug fixes in hadronics possibly affecting experiments. The most notable a fix to a problem found by ATLAS, where high energy secondary particles could be emitted in the backwards hemisphere.

Action Item: D.Wright to investigate the lack of a charge exchange process.

A.Ribon, invited for this point, reported on large scale testing using grid resources. Testing was carried out on SLC4 reducing the number of available machines to about half. Running using the seven main physics lists showed very stable running, with the exception of single NaN warnings from elastic scattering at the beginning of jobs. The candidate tag 04 is also running with catching of floating point exceptions turned on. A subset of jobs is run with magnetic field on.\

3.Release 9.1 and status of 2007 deliverables

G.Cosmo reported on the progress of the release.
A detailed list of 2007 deliverables achieved or delayed was presented by all working groups, see the reports:

Action Item: M.Verderi shall arrange for a new hyper-news forum on Biasing and Scoring.\

4.Open Issues

Under pending actions it was decided to split Action Item 41.3, and to make this explicit.

The request by RSICC to redistribute Geant4 was discussed. Two Concerns were raised, first, a CD/DVD distribution may hide patches and new release; second, previous experience with the Swas agreed making RSICC aware of our experience and concerns was agreed upon.

Action Item: J.Apostolakis will draft a response letter to RSICC and circulate this to the SB by e-mail.\

5. Action of Review recommendations and preparation for delta Review 2008

The mandate as circulated by email to the SB on 29 November was approved without any concern raised. The task force should provide a report by 15 March.

Action Item:J.Apostolakis and M.Asai shall propose the task force membership.\

6. Representation at SB - implementing Regulations

A recent review of working group membership showed that two working groups, the electromagnetic and the low energy electromagnetic working group, are close to the threshold for a second representative.

The role of student members was unclear; it was agreed that student members should count like normal collaborations members after being active in Geant4 for about 1 year.

John reminded that working group representatives need to be elected every year, and that SB chair need to elected every two years.

7. AOB

Ian McLaren proposed that Anton Ivantchenko be admitted to Geant4, working on STT.

The meeting adjourned at 12:00.

(Note: problems experienced due to using for first time an alternative telephone connection system. Issues understood.)

Meeting Date

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - 12:00