Simulation Project Leaders Meeting 17-February-2009 ==== Attendees John Apostolakis (JA), Alberto Ribon (AR), Gabriele Cosmo (GC), Pere Mato (PM). Excused: Rob Veenhof (RV). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Minutes - The LHCC review has been taken on February 16th. The final report is expected on the 20th. - M.Kossov has started his scientific associateship in Geant4 and will work for the next 8 months to improve the existing CHIPS module code and contribute to physics improvements in other areas. - G.Camellini, new technical student has started his contract in February and will work on geometry solids modeling in Geant4 and FLUGG maintenance. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation physics validation & framework - Alberto - Meetings: o There have been no Physics Validation meeting since the last SL meeting in December. The next meeting is planned for March 25th. - ATLAS test-beam analyses: still busy to complete the analyses and write the final papers. A presentation is expected at the next Physics Validation meeting of March with comparisons made with Geant4 9.2. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Generator services - Alberto - Meetings: o A workshop on EvtGen has taken place in January. It was performed an overview on the various versions of the package available, with the idea to converge to a new version for LHC aiming to unify all approaches. A.Ryd, the original author of the EvtGen package and member of CMS, has offered to do the work. It was also agreed to migrate to use CLHEP-2.X series (currently still using the 1.9 series of the library). A request from the Herwig++ group to facilitate interface with EvtGen will be also considered. o The usage of Pythia from within EvtGen for hadron decays has led to organise a follow-up meeting which took place on February 4th. An agreement was reached to use a unique version of Pythia and avoid embedding in EvtGen any specific version or module of the MC generator. o On January 28th a meeting focussed on the new HepMC release 2.05 was held at CERN. L.Garren summarised all requests collected for the new release (particle status code, bar-codes, cross-sections information, I/O issues, etc...) and an agreement was reached on how to proceed. The minutes of the meeting have been distributed and new distinct Savannah pages are now available for user's feedback on the new release. A beta release of the HepMC 2.05 is scheduled for the end of February; the final release is expected by end of March. LHC experiments will still make use of release 2.03.09 for the time being; therefore it has been proposed to continue support for the 2.03 series and drop support for 2.04 in view of the new release 2.05. The next meeting will be in June or July. - GENSER: o No feedback received from the experiments so far in the usage of the new Pythia experimental setup using 'autotools'. The issue or relocatable libraries achieved through 'libtools' should be carefully verified, in order to guarantee self-consistent builds of the packages and possibility for the libraries to be exported/shipped in different installation areas. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Fluka - Alfredo - The latest release 2008.03.7 has been made last September. AF will soon install it in the LCG AFS area. - The last Fluka course was taken in Paris last October, next course will be in Athens at the end of March, expecting roughly 30-35 students. Another course is programmed in beginning of November 2009 in Mumbai (India) with 40 people, of which 30 should be from India. Received several requests for organising an advanced course. - Physics: ready to have the first version of DPA damage in the code. Improvements in the electro-magnetic part are currently going on in collaboration also with F.Salvat from the Penelope group in Barcelona. Currently working in preparing a book on particle Monte Carlo simulation, mainly focussed on the physics of Monte Carlo radiation transport, and covering both electro-magnetic and hadronics; it is also in plan to have a final chapter dedicated to a short description of the major codes available. - Also progressing with the UI development in Flair; a technical student is currently working on the development of a 3D viewer based on ray-tracing technique. - The new web site has been put in place in July and is now stable, also for what concerns the tools used. 3000 users have registered so far; it is however hard to gauge how many among these are really active users, a rough estimation is around 700. Some statistics are now implemented directly on the web site. Slight problem related to managing commercial users from companies who register; a standard questionnaire is used for gathering information about the intended usage of the software. - NEA has started the testing and distribution of the code. - Lots of activity is going on in the field of medical applications and in particular for hadron therapy, both in Heidelberg and in Italy with INFN. - Since few weeks also providing a binary image of Fluka which can be run through a virtual machine. Tests are still on going for porting on 64-bits hardware. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Geant4 - John - Release 9.2: o Geant4 9.2 has been released on time last December. Among the things to note, a measured CPU performance boost of 25% in Bertini based physics. The new release is based on CLHEP release 2.0.4.2, where PDG values have been updated to PDG-2008, including the electron mass (with measured effect of the order of 10E-7 for radiation length computations). o The Fritiof FTF model has been substantially improved, while fixes have been introduced in the Bertini cascade, for Coulomb barrier corrections and sampling of the final state. o Spline interpolation for Dedx in electromagnetic processes resulted in an improved Bragg peak energy deposition and other physics observables. o Also included a new QMD model and an improved INCL/ABLA code now up to 3 GeV for carbon targets. - Feedback from experiments: o It must be noted a good pre-release testing made by the experiments for release 9.2, both by ATLAS and CMS. Some issues were spotted and fixed in time for inclusion in the release. - Meetings: o A Delta review, follow up of the 2007 Internal Review, has taken place at CERN in January. A good picture of what is happening within the Geant4 Collaboration has been provided. The committee noted the many improvements achieved in both electro-magnetic and hadronics domains, the new plans and coordination strategy for the EM group, the work plan provided for the hadronic physics development in 2009 and beyond. The interaction with members of the Fluka team was explained. The committee also appreciated the recent CPU improvement obtained in the latest releases and the effort ongoing for investing multi-threading in Geant4 (currently a PhD student is working on the subject, and is expected to graduate next year). Also mentioned the collaboration with Fermilab in the organisation of code reviews made in different areas of the hadronic code and recently in particular on the CHIPS module. Also highlighted the critical manpower situation in some areas, which is limiting both development and maintenance. o A Steering Board meeting is to be held on February 17th. o The next public Technical Forum is programmed for March 10th. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Garfield - Rob (offline report) - P10 pressure dependent Penning transfer analysis is complete, a paper is in the process of being written by O.Sahin. - Progressing in the avalanche statistics studies; work carried on by RV. - The semi-conductor detailed ionisation modeling is virtually complete, now progressing towards relaxation mechanisms and delta electron deposition (H.Schindler). - RV will be visiting Saha (India) in February with a view to neBEM calculations. - The TRIM interface paper has been submitted to JINST (J.Butterworth). - M.Tsagri is currently working within Geant4; she is expected to join the activities in Garfield shortly and going to work on neutron processes in gases. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== AOB Next meeting scheduled for April 7th.