Public Minutes of the 83 rd Steering Board Meeting

February 4th, 2014

Attendees: Makoto Asai, Michael Kelsey,Ben Morgan, Dennis Wright, Joseph Perl, Marc Verderi, Peter Gumplinger, michel maire, ivana Hrivnacova, John Allison, Alberto Ribon, Gabriele Cosmo, Gunter Folger, Koichi Murakami, Sébastien Incerti, Vladimir Ivanchenko

Excuses: Hisaya Kurashige, Luciano Pandora

Invited: Daniel Elvira

  1. Regular items

1) Open requirements, pending actions and open bug reports are reviewed.

  1. Report on computing performance

1) A systematic investigation of performances wrt build options has been conducted. A typical 20% speedup in event throughput is observed when using static libraries instead of shared ones.

2) An additional test with VMC has been made with Root built with shared libraries and Geant4 with static ones. A same speedup pattern is found with a 12% higher event throughput in the sequential mode, and a 20% one in the MT mode (the higher gain in this last case is understood as coming from TLS initialization, where tls-model=global-dynamic flag is used instead of the global-exec one used in Geant4).

3) These numbers will be shown at the LPCC workshop in March.

3. Creation of Physics List Working Group

1) The Steering Board has approved the creation of a new working group “Physics List”.

2) The mandate of the working group is physics lists maintenance and validation.

3) Gunter Folger and Andrea Dotti will act as interim coordinator and deputy coordinator. They will have to identify the group members and will be responsible for conducting the coordinator and deputy coordinator election.

4) The working group will take over the physics performance task force.

5) The work of Computing Performance Task Force will be taken over by Testing and Q/A WG. Reports on physics and computing performances will be a part of the regular agenda item from the next SB meeting.

  1. 2014 Collaboration process

1) Census

i. The collaboration census is being finalized.

ii. Working groups having more than 2 FTE have additional representative at the SB. This involves the standard EM, low EM and hadronic working groups, which have 1, 2 and 3 additional representatives, respectively.

2) Elections:

i. Elections of working group coordinator and deputy coordinator will be carried now, with completion on 28th of February. The new Steering Board will be formed by early March.

ii. The spokesperson election will be carried this year as well. The Steering Board will appoint a team for driving the election process.

  1. Toolkit Developers Guide

1) The “Geant4 User’s Guide for Toolkit Developers” will be revised this year.

2) This will be one the Collaboration wide item of 2014.

  1. General paper

1) The detailed section outline is near completion.

2) A first draft of sections is planned for the coming weeks.

3) The authorship identification process will start, using current and past censuses.

  1. AOB

1) New collaborator(s)

i. Federico Carminati (CERN) membership has been agreed. He will be part of the Hadronic working group, for improving cross-section and final state performances.

2) Report from recent events

i. Geant4 tutorial @ U. of Tokyo, 17-19, December 2013:

  1. http://wiki.kek.jp/display/geant4/Geant4+Japanese+Tutorial+2013

  2. The tutorial has been a success, with a large audience of about 100 participants.

ii. Geant4 beginner course @ Belfast (Northern Ireland), 20-24 January 2014.

  1. http://agenda.infn.it/event/BelfastGeant4Course2014

  2. No report.

iii. European School in Instrumentation for Particle and Astroparticle Physics: with simulation lectures initially on 3rd and 4th of February, 2014:

  1. https://espace.cern.ch/esipap/SitePages/Home.aspx

  2. The simulation lectures have been moved to 10th and 11th of February.

3) Near future events

i. Geant4 Space Users Workshop, 27-29 May, 2014 @ NASA/MSFC Huntsville, Alabama, USA

  1. The meeting date has changed to adapt to the new date of the “SEE Symposium”.

4) Tutorial/course:

i. Geant4 tutorial @ Stanford U, 3-6, March 2014

  1. http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/geant4/Tutorial.asp

  2. Speakers from NVIDIA, Google and Colfax/Intel will also be invited.

5) Meeting of interest:

i. LPCC LHC detector simulations: status, needs and prospects @ CERN 18-19 March, 2014

  1. https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?ovw=True&confId=279530

  2. The draft agenda is one and half day devoted to physics finding, then last half day dedicated to simulation and simulation developments.

  3. It is proposed to hold a Technical Forum the day after this meeting.

ii. Annual Concurrency Workshop @ CERN 1-2 April, 2014

  1. http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=289682

  2. This is the second workshop edition, with presentation of various demonstrators, and future plans.

  3. It is followed by the HEP Software Collaboration meeting.

iii. HEP Software Collaboration meeting @ CERN 3-4, April, 2014

  1. https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?ovw=True&confId=297652

  2. This meeting will focus on organizing a collaborative effort to address future evolution and adaptation of the software to the new technologies.

  3. Geant4 members are strongly invited to participate to this meeting.

iv. International Workshop on Monte Carlo Techniques in Medical Physics @ Quebec, Canada, 17-20 June, 2014

  1. http://www.mcw2014.phy.ulaval.ca/

  2. This is the fourth edition of this meeting.

6) AOB

i. It is expected to have a correction patch for release 10.0 during the month of February, followed by back ported fixes to release 9.6.

Meeting Date

Tuesday, February 4, 2014 - 12:00