Public Minutes of the 86 th Steering Board Meeting
July 2nd, 2014
Attendees: Makoto Asai, Takashi Sasaki, Andrea Dotti, Dennis Wright, Alberto Ribon, Gabriele Cosmo, Ben Morgan, Marc Verderi, Soon Yung Jun, Sebastien Incerti, Ivana Hrivnacova, Hisaya Kurashige, Peter Gumplinger, Michael Kelsey, Vladimir Ivanchenko, Gunter Folger, John Allison (OB liaison), Laurent Garnier, Koichi Murakami
Excuses: Luciano Pandola
Invited: Francesco Romano (Low EM WG deputy)
1. 2014 Collaboration Meeting
The Collaboration meeting in Okinawa will be preceded by the Geant4 20th anniversary symposium. All collaborators are invited to this event. Several speakers external to the Collaboration will be invited with travels supported by KEK. The agenda of the symposium will be finalized soon.
The Collaboration meeting will be held on 4 days, with 8 plenary sessions and 16 parallel ones.
The Program Committee held its first meeting and established a preliminary list of plenary session items: opening addresses and user requirements; overview of new computing facilities (e.g. C++11, C++14, Qt5, etc.); updates of electromagnetic and hadronic physics and validation; updates of kernel categories including multi-threading; updates of GUI/Vis, examples, documents. Other potential topics should be proposed to the Program Committee.
Parallel sessions have to be requested by July 25th using the following web form: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?usp=drive_web\&formkey=dHBwTHhuTUlqNXBRaG1FckQzMGdLV3c6MA
gid=0](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?usp=drive_web\&formkey=dHBwTHhuTUlqNXBRaG1FckQzMGdLV3c6MA#gid=0)
Parallel sessions will be 90 minutes long, with a potential extension of 15 minutes, to be asked for when requesting the session.
2. Regular items
Open Requirements, pending actions and open bug reports are reviewed. For this last item, assignees of long standing bug reports have been asked for details on the issues, as decided during the previous Steering Board meeting.
In the scope of the physics performance monitoring, it is reported that the unphysical bump at 5 GeV with FTFP_BERT physics list is now understood and fixed, and was due to a wrong use of the Reggeon cascade threshlods. The FTF model will likely be re-tuned to take into account the effect of this fix.
The computing performance monitoring shows that steady improvements are observed with reference tags.
3. Towards 10.1 release
No major issues have been reported at this point. The next Steering Board meeting, during the Collaboration meeting, will review the status of developments.
4. General paper
Progress has been made, and it is anticipated that a complete first draft shall be available at the Collaboration meeting time. The authorship survey will take place at same time, especially to collect the name of collaborators who left Geant4.
5. AOB
a. Input from recent events
o A report about the last SATIF meeting (FNAL, 28-30 April 2014) has been made, where benchmark results on neutron transport codes were presented. Geant4 now compares well with other neutron transport capable codes, but remains however a modest player in the shielding field.
https://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=7469
o The 10th Geant4 Space Users Workshop (NASA / MSFC Huntsville, AL USA, May 27-29, 2014) had several outstanding invited contributions, from NASA launching system director, and from an ISS astronaut. The attendance from abroad was however poor, because of difficulties with travel budgets.
The 11th Space User’s Workshop will be in Hiroshima, in late August 2015.
http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/geant4/G4SUW2014/
o The International Space Development Conference (Los Angeles, 14 - 18 May, 2014) aims at covering issues related to a large panel of future space activities. D. Wright gave 30 minutes talk for radiation in space, and reported a visible interest to Geant4.
The next conference will be in Toronto.
o At the International Workshop on Monte Carlo Techniques in Medical Physics (Quebec, Canada, 17-20 June, 2014) Sebastien Incerti was an invited speaker. EGSNRC, Penelope, Geant4 were the Monte Carlo codes most presented. The accelerated GATE-GPU Monte Carlo received also attention.
The next meeting will be in 2017.
http://www.mcw2014.phy.ulaval.ca/
b. Near future events
o The conference IEEE/NSS/MIC will take place in Seattle, November 8-15, 2014. It has no planned contributions from Geant4 collaborators.
http://nssmic2014.npss-confs.org/
o At the ACAT conference (Prague, September 1-5, 2014), John Apostolakis will give a talk on Geant4 v10 and planned developments for v10.1.
https://indico.cern.ch/event/258092/
c. Reminder :
The deadline for early registration of the Collaboration meeting is August 1st.
Meeting Date
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - 12:00