Public Minutes of the 77 th Steering Board Meeting,
February 26th 2013
Attendees: Makoto Asai (chair), Hisaya Kurashige, Mike Kelsey, Andrea Dotti, Luciano Pandola, Ivana Hrivnacova, Marc Verderi, Peter Gumplinger, Dennis Wright, Koichi Murakami, Alberto Ribbon, Gunter Folger, Gabriele Cosmo, Vladimir Ivantchenko, Joseph Perl, Takashi Sasaki, John Allison (OB liaison)
Excuses: Daniel Elvira, Sebastien Incerti
1. 2013 Work plan
The working groups work plans for 2013 were circulated prior to the meeting, where further discussions happened. These work plans are linked below under the working group names, with a summary of the discussions.
o Tracking
o Generic Processes & Materials
A meeting dedicated to issues raised by molecular modeling (in electromagnetic and low energy neutron physics mainly) was proposed to be planned. It is noted that possible molecule-related extensions would have to be cost-free for other domains.
o Standard Electromagnetic Physics
o Low-energy Electromagnetic Physics
The migration to Multi-Threading (MT) of the analysis package is not expected to be difficult. Difficulties are however expected for code directly exploiting analysis tools that do not guarantee thread-safety. For simple applications, the analysis module is recommended.
o User and Category Interfaces
The User and Category Interfaces working group shares with the Visualization one issue regarding the interaction between the user and a MT-application. Use-cases will be clarified under a common discussion.
The support of the new Qt5 (Mac) will be considered.
By default, examples will be MT-compliant. For scoring, they will exploit the thread-safe scoring functionalities. For cases where a user wishes to use stepping and tracking actions for scoring, it is underlined that care should be taken when using accumulated quantities in MT mode. One example will provide a demonstration.
Some examples may stick to run only in sequential mode if they require thread unsafe analysis tool.
The migration to MT implies a significant investment in testing, with revision of some existing tools, and inclusion of new ones.
o The Collaboration wide plan for migration to MT proposed at the Collaboration Meeting was confirmed.
2. Progress in multi-threading
o Progresses in developments related to multi-threading have been reported.
o A task force dedicated to the migration to MT is formed. It will centralize expertise and will organize the Collaboration wide effort for the migration and related documentation.
o Andrea Dotti is appointed as this task force leader.
3. Improvements of documentation
o More regular updates of Geant4 manuals (instead of once per year coupled to the public release) will be done. These updates will include in particular corrections or missing contents.
4. Publications
o Two general papers are targeted for 2013: one for the MC2013 conference and one Collaboration wide paper. One important topic will be in particular the migration to MT.
5. Regular items
o Open requirements, pending actions, open bug reports are reviewed.
o A Geant4 internal JIRA page is open to collaborators to track internal issues regarding developments: http://jira-geant4.kek.jp/browse/DEV .
6. AOB
a. Beta release: the schedule will be announced soon.
b. KISTI contribution and support:
o KISTI joined the Collaboration few months ago. 128 CPUs connected to the GRID will be permanently provided for Geant4 physics validation. Additional CPU time, not connected to the GRID, is also provided. AIX is planned for addition to regular system testing.
c. Technical Forum
o The proposed date is March 26th (Tue) 16:00-18:00, at CERN.
d. Near future conferences
i. CHEF2013, Paris, April 22-25
o http://llr.in2p3.fr/chef2013/
o The deadline for abstract is end of February.
ii. ACAT, Beijing, May 16-21
o Deadline for contributions (papers, posters) submission is March 2nd
iii. 2013 Geant4 user conference at the physics-medicine-biology frontier, Bordeaux - October 7-11
o http://geant4.in2p3.fr/2013/
o The registration will be open by end of February.
o This is a conference and tutorial event.
iv. MC2013, Paris, October 27-31
o https://www.sfen.fr/SNA-and-MC-2013
o The deadline for abstract submission has been further extended, and is now end of March. Collaborators are encouraged to submit.
v. IEEE/NSS/MIC/RTSD-2013, Seoul - October 27 - November 2
o http://www.nss-mic.org/2013/
o The deadline for abstract is May 13th.
vi. CHEP, Amsterdam, October 14-18
o Abstract submission deadline is 25th of March
vii. SuperComputing 2013, Denver, November 17-22
o http://sc13.supercomputing.org/
o Deadlines for abstract and full submission are April 5th and April 12th, respectively.
e. Near future events
a.Geant4 Space Users Workshop
o http://www.inta.es/g4suw2013/index.html
b.2nd Geant4 Australian School and Monte Carlo Workshop
o http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/phys/cmrp/UOW135963.html
Meeting Date
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - 12:00