Public Minutes of the Geant4 Steering Board meeting 65

20th May 2011

Attended: Makoto Asai, Sebastien Incerti, Paul Gueye, Takashi Sasaki, Ivana Hrivnacova, Joseph Perl, Hisaya Kurashige, Andrea Dotti, Gabriele Cosmo, Gunter Folger, Vladimir Ivanchenko, Koichi Murakami, Dennis Wright, Michel Maire, Marc Verderi, John Allison, Peter Gumplinger, Susanna Guatelli.

Excused: none.

1. Regular items

a. Approval of minutes of SB meeting of April 12th, 2011

b. Reviewing pending actions from April 2011

2. Updates on 9.5-beta release

The 9.5-beta release will include the external code expat (XML parser) to serve the data reading of the new LEND hadronic module. The part of CLHEP used in Geant4 will be included as well, and will be built and used by default, allowing the users to be freed from the CLHEP installation. The use of an external CLHEP will be still possible, as an option.

On the physics side, 9.5-beta release will include an implementation of anti-baryon-nucleus and anti-ion-nucleus interactions in the FTF model and an implementation of the trailing effect in the Bertini cascade. The complete interface to ENDL high precision neutron database for low energy neutron models will be available. Additional energy and momentum conservation detection in models and physics-lists will be provided.

The new multi-layered geometry functionality will be delivered after the beta release.

**3. Following-up 2011 development plans **

The Multi-threaded prototype is to be released soon, together with a user’s guide, being finalized currently. A dedicated hypernews forum will be open at the release time.

The modifications needed in the materials category to allow for variable density materials have been implemented. The related work in the electromagnetic/standard category is in progress. The functionality is effective in the DNA physics package, since it does not required pre-computed physics tables, and an advanced example “dnaphysics” will be available in 9.5-beta. The functionality is effective also for the hadronics package.

A new mechanism regarding the easiness in implementing physics lists has been prototyped. It is backward compatible, meaning that existing physics lists do not need modifications. It relies on process types and subtypes.

A scheme to allow for forcing an interaction in a volume is in development, and will enrich existing biasing options.

The novice and extended examples working group has proposed a draft scheme for the example revision.

A draft scheme for unifying error messages and exception is proposed to discussion.

  • 4. Reports from Task Force

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The computing performance task force reports on progress. The FNAL team will evaluate how to integrate the time and memory profiling exercises for the CMS simulation application. An additional simple calorimeter benchmark will be used to monitor the CPU and memory consumption performances.

5. AOB

The next technical forum is scheduled for june 8th and is associated with the “International Workshop on Recent Advances in Monte Carlo Techniques for Radiation Therapy”, in Montreal:

http://www.medphys.mcgill.ca/~ws2011/Welcome.html

Its scope will be limited to medical application. This is the first technical forum of this type. The agenda will be linked to the Geant4 page.

The second next forum date has to be decided.

The collaboration meeting will be held at SLAC, Sept. 19-23, 2011. A temporary meeting page and agenda are available from the Geant4 page.

Meeting Date

Friday, May 20, 2011 - 12:00