Public Minutes of the 79 th Steering Board Meeting

May 30th 2013

Attendees: Makoto Asai (chair), Michael Kelsey, Ivana Hrivnacova, Marc Verderi, Ben Morgan, Peter Gumplinger, Dennis Wright, Takashi Sasaki, Gunter Folger, Andrea Dotti, Sébastien Incerti, Vladimir Ivantchenko, Alberto Ribon, Gabriele Cosmo, Koichi Murakami, Joseph Perl, John Allison (OB liaison), Michel Maire

**Excuses: **Hisaya Kurashige, Luciano Pandola

1. Regular items:

Open requirements, pending actions and open bug reports are reviewed.
Makoto Asai will remind each working group coordinator and bug assignee for fixing bugs and update the status in the JIRA system.

2. Status of the 10.0-beta release

· The beta major release geant4-10-00-beta is planned for June 28th 2013.

June 7th is the deadline for tags submission.
The migration to MT is the major evolution. It is reminded the location of the documents related to this migration:

· https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Geant4/Geant4MTForApplicationDevelopers

· https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Geant4/Geant4MTTipsAndTricks

· https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Geant4/MultiThreadingTaskForce

Working group coordinators reported the status on migrations of their categories and related examples/tests.

· Tests in MT mode by developers are strongly encouraged for helping with wide test coverage.

· Non MT-related developments at risk for the beta release were reviewed.

· The extension of QGS at energy low enough to allow the junction with intra-nuclear cascade models is postponed to 10.0. FTF will continue at being used for covering the energy gap in the meantime.

· Setting correct flags for the steps that are first or last steps of a volume for the case with EM field is postponed to 10.0.

· Request to allow fast math libraries usage made by several experiments has been fulfilled.

3. Publication

· The MC2013 deadline for full papers was initially July 1st, but extended to July 15th. Unclear also is the status of the acceptance of the abstracts for granular papers, which should have come last week, and which is the condition for paper submission.

· The new general paper outline will be circulated soon for approval. The next step will be to identify people for writing sections.

4. 2013 Collaboration meeting

· The program committee is being formed. At present, in addition to the ex-officio and local organizers, Alberto Ribon and Koichi Murakami agreed to be part of the committee, a third member will be appointed.

· The meeting venue has been booked. The registration fee is expected at the 400€ level, and will include banquet, lunches and excursion.

· Payment will be possible by bank transfer or cash only. Because of a 25% charging by an external company, payment by credit card has not been retained as a payment option.

· The Collaboration meeting web page will be made available soon.

5. Recent events

· “CHEF2013”, Paris, April 22-25: This is a conference dedicated to calorimetry, adopting an integrated “device + particle flow” approach. It was visible that the simulation in this field is dominated by Geant4. Regular communication with CALICE will be set up.

· “2nd Geant4 Australian School and Monte Carlo Workshop”, Wollongong (Australia), April 19-24. About 50 people attended the Geant4 course. Joseph Perl was a lecturer. The MC workshop had also 50 people attending, with some overlap with Geant4 course attendees. It was noted a possible new field of application of Geant4 to metallurgy, to predict growth of impurities in steel.

· “Geant4 tutorial for ED MIPEGE”, in France, Orsay, May 13-25. This was originally a tutorial for doctorants, but it has extended to a few physicists, with 21 participants. 10 sessions (each have lecture + exercise) were organized, on two weeks. Ivana Hrivnacova (organizer), Laurent Garnier and Marc Verderi were lecturers.

· Institute of Physics half-day conference on “The Use of Geant4 in Nuclear Physics”, 15th May 2013, UK. It has about 40 participants. Alex Howard and John Allison gave mini-keynote talks. Lots of activities, mostly through frameworks - GATE, GAMOS, TOPAS, etc. were presented. Users were encouraged to contribute to Geant4 development.

6. AOB

· The isomers introduction in the hadronic package has to cope with the handling of large tables. At this point, this causes penalty (<10%) in MT mode. The situation will be improved after the Beta release.

· Near future conferences:

· PTCOG, Essen, Germany, June 2 - 8

o http://ptcog.web.psi.ch/

· 2013 Geant4 user conference at the physics-medicine-biology frontier + tutorial, Bordeaux - October 7-11

o http://geant4.in2p3.fr/2013/

o Deadline for acceptance of abstract is July 1st.

· MC2013, Paris, October 27-31

o https://www.sfen.fr/SNA-and-MC-2013

o Acceptance of abstracts was May 15th, but not announced yet

· IEEE/NSS/MIC/RTSD-2013, Seoul - October 27 - November 2

o http://www.nss-mic.org/2013/

o One submission made for hadronics.