Public Minutes of 135th Steering Board, 20th December 2023

Present: Gabriele Cosmo, Ben Morgan, Makoto Asai (OB liaison), Mihaly Novak, Soon Yung Jun, Dennis Wright, Daren Sawkey, Alberto Ribon, Lorenzo Pezzotti, Alex Howard, Krzysztof Genser, Ivana Hrivnacova, Susanna Guatelli, Vladimir Ivantchenko, Marc Verderi, John Apostolakis (number: 16)

Excused: Gunter Folger, Witold Pokorski

1. Situation with respect to general context (war, pandemic, etc.)

  • From CERN Council:

    • “The cooperation will come to an end on 27 June 2024 for the Republic of Belarus, and on 30 November 2024 for the Russian Federation. All relations between CERN and Russian and Belarusian institutions will cease as of these dates. Relations continue with scientists of Russian or Belarusian nationality otherwise affiliated with CERN.”

    • No problems are expected for 2024, but for 2025, if the situation remains unchanged, we will not be able to invite at CERN our Russian collaborators who do not have association with non-Russian Institutions.

    • New pandemic waves for several weeks now.

2. Regular items

  • The regular items - user requirements, on-going SB actions, bug reports, new publications, CPU and physics performances - were reviewed.

3. Status of releases

  • The new, minor Geant4 release 11.2 has been announced on December 8th, as scheduled; the release process was extremely smooth. A patch release (11.2.p01) may be planned for February 2024.

  • The third patch of the 11.1 series, 11.1.p03, has been released on November 10th.

4. GPU projects assessment

  • The Geant4 assessment of AdePT and Celeritas R&D project was held at CERN on December 13-14. The assessment panel, made of 10 people, has appreciated the work and the documentation provided by the AdePT and Celeritas teams. A report from the assessment team is expected for January 2024.

5. Collaboration matters

  • 2024 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 in Catania, 7-11 October, 2024.

6. Events

  • Past events:

    • Geant4 Advanced Course @ CERN, 16-20 October 2023.

    • Geant4 Space Users Workshop, 5-7 December 2023, Pasadena (USA).

  • Next events:

    • Geant4 tutorial in Ghana, 18-22 March 2024.

    • Geant4 tutorial at Jefferson Lab (USA), 25-29 March 2024.

Meeting Date Wednesday, December 20, 2023 - 22:00 (CET)