Public Minutes of 122nd Steering Board, 18th November 2020

Present:  Alberto Ribon, Makoto Asai, S. Guatelli, V. Ivanchenko, L. Pandola, Ben Morgan, Alex Howard, John Allison (OB Liaison), Marc Verderi, Koichi Murakami, Ivana Hrivnacova, Witek Pokorski, Mihaly Novak, Soon Yung Jun, Gabriele Cosmo, Laurent Garnier, Gunter Folger

Excused: Daren Sawkey

1. Situation wrt to pandemic

The pandemic has not impacted strongly our activities this year, but is a penalty for what face-to-face meetings are concerned, slowing down exchanges. This makes particularly important to well anticipate discussions for next year release.

2. Focus on release

No major difficulties have been met, the release is on schedule. A significant speed up in the 5-10% range is observed. It is still under measurement and is likely coming from several sources, with in particular the transportation and field transportation reviews.

The Multi-Threading (MT) will be kept as default mechanism for this release; the new Tasking scheme can be selected via environment variable. A dedicated slot in CDash has been created for running under this mode. You are invited to try this scheme and report for any problem. In particular, the Tasking mechanism makes use of more threads in parallel than the MT mode, stressing more data race conditions.

It is reminded that the deadline for Documentation is Friday, November 27th.

3. Regular items

A round table of working group activities is made, as well as a review of pending requirements and SB actions. Requirements from the recent LPCC workshop will be added to JIRA.

Bug reports have been documented during the review. You are invited to update Bugzilla if you are in charge of some reports.

4. Publication Board

Soon Yung Jun is ending his mandate in the Pub Board and as chair of this board. Our appreciations go to Soon Yung !

Makoto Asai is joining the board. This board is hence composed of Susanna  Guatelli (new chair), Alexander Howard, Makoto Asai.

5. Web site

During the Collaboration meeting, it was agreed to review our web site and several members declared their interest in contributing.  Anna Zaborowska, Grigorii Latyshev and Dmitri Konstantinov took the initiative of drafting a nice and more modern site, making use of the Jekyll technology (https://thegriglat.gitlab.io/g4site/) . Anna was invited at the SB to present this initiative.

A task force to organize the web site revision is created, Alex Howard has agreed to chair it.

6. Events

6.1 Past events

  • [Virtual] Geant4 Advanced Course @ CERN, 28 September - 2nd October 2020.
    • It has been a successful event. There have been many more requests than available places (limited to 45 participants).
    • It was also a first experience of a virtual tutorial, based on Zoom. This went well, the format was well suited for an advanced course.
  • [Virtual] OB meting, 2nd October 2020
    • Makoto Asai is now an OB member, representing SLAC and other US developers, Fermilad excepted as being already represented.
    • Hisaya Kurashige is taking over Katsuya Amako for Japanese developers.
    • The OB members expressed their appreciation with our achievements and directions.
  • [Virtual] 4th LPCC (LHC Physics Center at CERN) detector simulation workshop, 2-3 November 2020
    • No major difficulties have been exposed.
    • We expressed our strong wish to have the experiment test beam data included in our validation suite.
    • A dedicated workshop on fast simulation is foreseen for next year.

6.2 Future events

  • [Virtual] HSF-WLCG virtual workshop, 19-24 November 2020
  • [Virtual] IN2P3 & PHENIICS Geant4 School, Orsay (France), 23-27 November 2020.
  • 43rd COSPAR, Sydney, 28th January-4th February 2021
    • This will be a hybrid event, in person and remote.
    • The topic is space research.
    • S. Guatelli on behalf of Geant4-DNA will present the progress of Geant4-DNA.
  • There will be a CHEP 2021 virtual event.

7.  Technical Forum

Marilena Bandieramonte (U. of Pittsburgh, ATLAS) has accepted to become the new TF chair.

8. AOB

The next SB meeting will initiate the discussion and planning of the 2021 release. In particular, the following discussion threads have been set up:

Meeting Date

Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - 12:00