Public minutes of 111th SB meeting on November 6th, 2018

Present : Makoto Asai, Dennis Wright, Gabriele Cosmo, Marc Verderi, Luciano Pandola, Susanna Guatelli, Soon Yung Jun, Takashi Sasaki, Gunter Folger, Ivana Hrivnacova, Alex Howard, John Allison (OB Liaison), Ben Morgan, Koichi Murakami, Laurent Garnier

Invited : Krzysztof Genser, Witold Pokorski (agenda item #1)

Excused : Sebastien Incerti, Alberto Ribon

1. Proposal of creating a new R\&D working group

  • This was a follow-up discussion from the Lund Collaboration Meeting.
  • K.L. Genser and W. Pokorski were invited to the meeting and made a presentation illustrating the proposal.
  • It would enhance the visibility of the fact that the Collaboration is open to emerging new technologies/architectures.
  • The main mandate of this new body would be to promote research on emerging new technologies/architectures, assessing them and making timely reports to the SB. Based on the nature of this body (reporting to the SB rather than taking direct responsibility for releasing code), the SB agreed it fits better to the concept of a “task force”. The duration of this new task force would be “regular-ongoing”.
  • Once a concrete technology/architecture is identified, the SB would create another dedicated task force to create workflow, estimate required resources and drive that particular development for integration in the code base (similat to what was the case for the multi-threading task force in the recent past).
  • Witek Pokorski is appointed as the interim chair of this new task force.
  • The concrete mandate of this task force will be discussed at the next meeting.

2. Regular items

  • The open requirements, pending actions, status of long open bug reports, as well as physics and computing performance monitoring are reviewed.
  • The current development version of the FTF and QGS models will be released along with version 10.5.
    • We expect that the experiments are underestimating Birk’s quenching. With a more correct quenching it is likely that the new FTF/QGS versions will give better agreement with the data.
    • Precise documentation on expected changes and the actions suggested to undertake by users to cope with the new physics results will appear in the 10.5 release notes eventually with details and plots linked from a dedicated web page.
  • Last development tag recovers the CPU/memory degradation observed in last summer development for the Shielding physics list; the degradation was due to changes made in the default EM option for some physics lists (QBBC, QGSP_BIC, QGSP_BIC_HP, Shielding).
    • Precise document on expected changes and the actions suggested to undertake by users to cope with the new physics results should appear in the 10.5 release notes, eventually with details and plots linked from a dedicated web page.

3. Version 10.5 release

  • 2018 work items are reviewed to identify items that are slipping from 10.5 release.
  • Getting to release phase; a first candidate release tag will be made available early next week.
  • Reminding about user docs to be submitted by November 30th and notify the coordinator in advance.

4. Git migration

  • Migration schedule and procedure
    • Expected timeline is:
      • December 7th, 10.5 release, SVN repository set to read-only
      • December 7-9th, Git mirror brought up to date with “last” SVN state
      • December 10-14th, Creation and testing of “geant4-dev” repository and testing infrastructure.
      • Expect to open “geant4-dev” to the Collaboration by 14th-17th December

5. 2019 Collaboration processes

  • Collaboration membership to be renewed in January through the web page.
  • Each WG should make census to be concluded by January 31st, 2019.

6. AOB

6.1 Recent events

6.2 Near future events

6.3 AOB***

  • **Date of 2019 Collaboration Meeting**

    • **Potential date is in September or October 2019. If major conflict is foreseen, report to Makoto by the end of November 2018.**

Meeting Date

Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - 12:00