Public minutes of 120th SB meeting on May 13th, 2020

Present : Marc Verderi, Makoto Asai, Susanna Guatelli, Sebastien Incerti, Hisaya Kurashige, Luciano Pandola, Dennis Wright, Koichi Murakami, Soon Yung Jun, Ben Morgan, Witek Pokorski,Gabriele Cosmo, Alberto Ribon, John Allison (OB Liaison), Alex Howard, Ivana Hrivnacova, Daren Sawkey, Gunter Folger, Vladimir Ivanchenko, Laurent Garnier​

Excused :

0. Report of spokesperson election

  • Makoto Asai, Ben Morgan and Luciano Pandola who formed the Candidate Nomination Team and then the Election Management Team report about the spokesperson election process, concluded on April 17th. The process is approved.
  • The Steering Board appreciates Makoto, Ben and Luciano for having driven the election process, and warmly thanks Dr. Bill Murray (U. Warwick) for having assumed efficiently the role of tally taker.

1. Situation wrt to Covid-19 pandemic & next Collaboration Meeting

  • It does not seem the pandemic is creating too particular difficulties to the Collaboration members at this time.
  • Pandemic and Collaboration meeting:
  • Because of the many uncertainties, it is agreed to make the meeting online, on the same dates, 21st - 25th of September.
  • The proposal for a reduced format is approved
    • with 2 hours per day for plenary, caring about different time zones
    • plus 2-hour parallel sessions if needed, organized by each Working Group.
      • For better convenience, parallel session may extend beyond the week.
  • A unique Indico page for the whole meeting will be kept.

2. On-going initiatives

  • HSF-Geant4 relation: a dialog is started with Graeme Stewart (HSF) on how having a more constructive relation, with expression of expectations from Geant4 to the HSF, in view of fostering exchanges with technical expertise from HSF and simulation experience from Geant4.
  • Making the age pyramid of Geant4 members​: establishing this information is in the goal to prepare in the best possible manner the next generation of Geant4 developers
  • Internal technical note practice: detailed information of how developments were made is not easy to find, specially for new members. A system will be discussed and implemented. Previous technical notes will be gathered in.
  • Examining and documenting generic MC transport processing flow: the idea is to spell out the constraints and intrinsic limitations due to the Monte Carlo nature of the transport problem and to document them. This is expected to help with the emergence of new ideas, and would allow new people who would want to contribute to make an educated choice on where to invest effort.

3. Regular items:

  • Round table of short report of Working Groups:
  • A round-of-the-table discussion is made about activities in each WG, reported by coordinators.

  • As prominent items, have been discussed the tasked-based parallelism development, the constraints from moving to C++17, developments to improve CPU performances, b- and c-physics in hadronics, migration start to new cluster for Q&A.

  • Open requirements, SB actions and bug reports are reviewed.

  • It is agreed to have a focus on bug reports at the next SB meeting.

  • Physics and computing performances monitoring did not spot particular issues.

4. Next release :

  • It is agreed to make the next release a minor one, hence 10.7.
  • No API changes are expected for this year release.

5. Events :

  • Because of the pandemic several events have been or will be cancelled or postponed.
  • Recent events:
  • Future events:
    • Joint International Conference on Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications + Monte Carlo 2020, Chiba (Japan), 18-22 May 2020​; cancelled
    • Geant4 Course at the 17th Seminar on Software for Nuclear, Sub-nuclear and Applied Physics, Porto Conte, Alghero (Italy), 24-29 May 2020; cancelled
    • SNO-labs summer school, SNO, 6-10th July, 2020; postponed to 2021
    • IX International Geant4 School, Catania, 5-9 October, 2020: confirmed
    • 4th Geant4 International User Conference at the Physics-Medicine-Biology frontier, Napoli, Italy, 19-21 October 2020; postponed to 2022
    • 4th LPCC (LHC Physics Center at CERN) detector simulation workshop, 2-3 November 2020 at CERN; kept for now](https://indico.cern.ch/event/908146/timetable/)

6. AOB:

  • Bid for “Efficient Computing for HEP” in UK : a proposal for what Geant4 simulation is concerned will be made

Meeting Date Wednesday, May 13, 2020 - 12:00](https://indico.cern.ch/event/908146/timetable/)