Geant4 Steering Board meeting - April 8th, 2010

Attending:

  • CERN: John, Gabriele, Vladimir Ivantchenko, Gunter, Michel Maire
  • US: Makoto, Dennis, Paul
  • Japan: Katsuya, Hisaya, Koichi, Takashi
  • Europe: Sebastien, John Allison, Christina, Luciano

Excuses: Joseph (John Allison deputising), Peter G.

Initial issues

  • Approval of minutes of SB meeting of February 11th - 25nd, 2010
    • Three days for comments on minutes. Typos and small issues: send to John & Makoto; other comments send to SB
  • Report of elections of Working Groups: report of process and results
    • Run, Event & Detector - Makoto, (dep) Hisaya
    • Documentation - Katsuya, (dep) Dennis
    • Geometry - Gabriele, (dep) John Ap.
    • Standard EM - Vladimir, (dep) Michel, (rep) Peter
    • Hadronics - done in 2009
    • Low-E EM - Sebastien, (dep) Giacomo, (rep) Paul, (rep) Christina
    • Material & Generic Process - Marc, (dep) Vladimir
    • Particle & Track - Hisaya, (dep) Makoto
    • Persistency - Gabriele, (dep) Witek
    • Tracking - Takashi, (dep) Katsuya
    • User & Category Interfaces - Koichi, (dep) Hajime
    • Visualization - Joseph, (dep) John Al.
    • Testing - Gunter, (dep) Andrea
    • Software Management - Gunter, (dep) Gabriele
    • Advanced examples - Pablo, (dep) Luciano
  • The SB approved all the election results.

[ New member(s) joined meeting. ]

Report from Technical Forum

  • Planned new developments for 2010: users’ feedback
    • Request for ROOT-IO for geometry persistency.
  • Technical Forum report
    • HARP
      • 100MeV-700MeV multiplicity differences between measurement and Geant4 were ~30%. QGSP_BERT.
    • LHCb
      • Requests improvements in Kaon cross-sections (in particular lower energies).
      • Physics Builders have different signatures to each other. They request to unify them.
      • Format of warning/error messages is not consistent. They request more standardized messages.
      • Remaining issues in multiple scattering in muon system and dE/dx in Silicon.
    • Georg Weidenspointner (MPI) - Requests PIXE model of MGP implementation (part of Nano5) to be included into the release. This code is already offered to this requester and his group.
    • CMS
      • Computing performance improvements they saw from v9.2 to v9.3 was ~5%.
      • Magnetic monopole example
      • Visualization of boolean subtraction solid with shared surface.
      • Neutron: potential need for accurate simulation of neutrons down to MeV region foreseen. Wish for it to incur minimum extra CPU cost.

Decisions on development plan

  • Incorporating feedback of Technical Forum
    • Unify the signatures of Physics Builder classes - should be included into this year’s development plan.
    • Use HARP-CDP data for tuning
    • Visualisation of subtraction solids is hard - will investigate use of external library
  • Proposal and decision on type of December release: minor release (9.4)
    • Michel - Due to the merging of Standard and Low-E EM processes, it is better to have a major release.
    • Gabriele - Classes may be removed if they are obsolete. For minor release, interface change is not allowed.
    • Luciano: Penelope08 under way, but keep the older version as “default” for now. No major change of public interface for these models, but anyway new files in the database.
    • Sebastien - More than 20 processes/models in Low-E need to be replaced.
    • Visualisation: At next major release: Remove i_mode argument in trajectory::Draw method.
    • Agreed that the next release is 9.4 (i.e. minor release). Obsolete classes may/should be removed even at the beta release time so that the user will be aware of these removal. No interface changes.

Reports

  • Report from Architecture Review Team
  • Report from Performance Task
  • Report from Multi-threading Task
  • Report from Oversight Board meeting of March 11th

  • Process for PIXE

    • Agreed technical assessment of interfaces of proposed alternative code;
    • Proposed that statement is drafted by Steering Board regarding future development of the PIXE module.
  • Drafting publication policy
    • Prepare draft publication policy, to be include them in the Collaboration Regulations;
    • Geant4 members will be expected to sign the regulations .

Conference Reports and Publications

  • Nomination of new team for Abstract Assessment and Editing
    • Volunteer requested from experienced SB members. Makoto to seek Peter and Marc + others
  • Establishing of internal deadlines
    • Ad interim the AAE team will continue its mandate until replaced by new team.

Geant4 Workshop @ ESTEC 4-8 October

  • Local Information
    • Urgent to identify how many people can attend (threshold of 40 for room) - doodle
  • Nomination of program committee
    • Please nominate people to contribute to Program Committee - by April 19th
    • John to name additional members in order to reach size of 3/4 + 2 local

Spokesperson Election

  • Candidate Nomination Team
    • Process to identify members for the Candidate Nomination Team will start first within the Steering Board. If enough potential members are identified in the SB, then the process will not be enlarged to other Geant4 collaboration members.
  • Time line
    • Deadlines for each part of the process.

AOB

  • Proposed SB members of TF chair nomination team (Makoto and Takashi) are agreed.
  • Qualifying a particular activity as a Geant4 contribution
  • Patch for Geant4 9.3

Meeting Date

Thursday, April 8, 2010 - 12:00