Public Minutes of 126th Steering Board, 16th December 2021

Present: Marc Verderi, Alberto Ribon, Mihaly Novak, Susanna Guatelli, Hisaya Kurashige, Makoto Asai (OB liaison), Marilena Bandieramonte, Soon Yung Jun, Ivana Hrivnacova,Vladimir Ivanchenko, Gunter Folger, Gabriele Cosmo, Alex Howard, Ben Morgan, Laurent Garnier, Koichi Murakami,Shogo Okada

1. Situation with respect to the pandemic

No specific difficulties have to be reported.

2. Regular items

A round-table of working group activities was made, as well as a review of pending requirements, SB actions and bug reports.

Regarding physics performance monitoring, ATLAS has updated the cavern background study with Geant4 10.6, finding a significant increase in the particle fluences with respect to the previous study made with Geant4 10.1 (in both cases, the Shielding physics list is used). Work is on-going to understand the differences, but it appears already that the main responsible is the new neutron data library, G4NDL4.6 (based on JEFF-3.3) and there might be problems for at least a few elements.

For computing performance monitoring, Geant4 11.0 is a few percent faster than Geant4 10.7 (or 10.7.p03), while the memory footprint of the former is 5-10% larger than the latter.

3. Status of the release and next steps

Geant4 version 11.0 was released as scheduled on December 10th, and the release process was extremely smooth.

A patch release (11.0.p01) may be planned in February 2022.

Next major development targets will be discussed at the coming SB meetings.

4. Spam issue on Bugzilla

A large number of spam messages have been recently posted in the Geant4 Bugzilla. These have been removed.

As an interim solution since the incident, all new user requests with anonymous email address (e.g. hotmail, gmail) are refused.

The registration procedure will be modified in such a way that a new user who needs to use an anonymous email address is requested to contact the potential bug assignee. Then the assignee authorizes the registration.

5. Status of the new website

A prototype is ready and a tutorial was organized to show how to use it.

Starting from January, a collaboration-wide effort is expected to take place to review and update the content of the website.

The plan is to switch to the new website in the first quarter of 2022.

6. Collaboration matters

2022 is an election year.

The registration of collaboration members and census will start on January 1st, followed in February by the election of working group coordinators, and concluding in March/April with the election of the spokesperson.

The Collaboration meeting is expected to be in person at Rennes, in September 2022. The date is still to be fixed.

7. Events

  • Past Events
    • OB meeting on October 18th, 2021
    • LHCC Computing Review on November 5th, 2021
    • LPCC Fast Simulation workshop on 22-23 November 2021
  • Future Events
    • Technical Forum on January 20th, 2022
    • MCMA 2022 - Monte Carlo Techniques for Medical Applications, Antwerp (Belgium), 11-13 April 2022
    • CALOR 2022, Sussex (UK), 16-20 May 2022
    • SATIF 2022, East Lansing (Michigan, USA), 20-23 Septembe 2022

Meeting Date Thursday, December 16, 2021 - 12:00