Public Minutes of the 68 th Steering Board Metting

November 23rd, 2011

Participants : Makoto Asai, Takashi Sasaki, Hisaya Kurashige, Andrea Dotti, Sébastien Incerti, Ivana Hrivnacova, Marc Verderi, Dennis Wright, Pablo Cirrone, Michel Maire, Daniel Elvira, Peter Gumplinger, John Allison (OB rep.), Joseph Perl, Gunter Folger, Giacomo Cuttone.

Excused : Koichi Murakami.

  1. Regular items

Approval of minutes of SB meeting of September 23rd, 2011.

Reviewing of pending actions as of September 2011.

  1. 9.5 release

The status of the candidate tag for release 9.5 is given. It is reminded that the Configure script will disappear, starting from this release. The Cmake installation procedure is the recommended one. On Windows, the Cygwin interface will not be supported anymore, and Cmake will directly be run on native Windows.

  1. Reports from tasks

A report is given on the monitoring of the CPU performances across releases as well as on the current development tags for 9.5. Variation with 10% are observed across versions, and are being investigated.

A report on the physics performances is presented as well. On the hadronic physics side, physics performances are stable w.r.t. 9.4.p02 and 9.5.beta. The electromagnetic physics performances are very stable in general, and improvements are observed with the new multiple scattering model.

  1. Reports from meetings

The LPCC Simulation Workshop was held at CERN on the 6th and 7th of October (

https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=144956) where experiments presented their status and requests, and physics validations. Geant4 physics is mostly satisfying the LHC needs. The hadronic model combination looking the most promising for now is Fritiof + Bertini + Geant4-precompound.

The LCG validation meeting format will change, and will in particular not be public anymore to allow experiments to present material not yet formally approved by their collaborations.

About 68 Geant4 related contributions where present at the IEEE/NSS/MIC conference (http://www.nss-mic.org/2011/NSSMain.asp). In particular, security related matter, using low energy neutron based techniques, seems to have an increasing interest in Geant4.

The 32nd Technical Forum took place on the 8th of November, at CERN (http://cern.ch/geant4/collaboration/technical_forum/).

  1. New requirements and status of current requirements

The deployment of the new requirement tracking system (http://jira-geant4.kek.jp/secure/Dashboard.jspa) will provide a more transparent information on the open requirements and on the related progresses. Requirements will formally be approved by the Steering Board.

  1. 2012 Collaboration processes

A schedule presenting the Collaboration processes, including the collaboration census and the next spokesperson election is agreed.

  1. Regulation of collaboration duties

Duties on participating to system testing shift will be tasked primarily to the SB members, starting from January 2012. A duty may be delegated to any collaborator. Original assigned SB member has the responsibility for making delegated duty surely take place. Publication editorial work remains to be shared by non-student collaborators with voluntary basis, and conducted by the Publication Board.

  1. AOB

The 2012 Collaboration Meeting will be held at Chartres, France, from the 10th to 14th of September.

Geant4 is given an invited plenary talk in CHEP 2012, at New York.

A Geant4 Oversight Board meeting will be held at CERN in February.

As planned, the old low-energy electromagnetic interfaces will be removed in 9.5.

Meeting Date

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - 12:00