Simulation Project Leaders Meeting 3-May-2005 ==== Attendees John Apostolakis (JA), Witek Pokorski (WP), Alberto Ribon (AR), Rob Veenhof (RV), Gabriele Cosmo (GC). Excused: Alfredo Ferrari. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Minutes The summary document of the internal AA review was well received and actions to address recommendations will be considered. The updated list of milestones for 2005 has been provided to Pere, an update in the official AA projects plan is expected. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation physics validation - Alberto - A physics validation meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, May 3rd. There will be presentations on the latest studies on radiation effects in LHCb using Geant4, on the ATLAS combined test-beam and validation in the CHIPS hadronic model of Geant4. - The recent activity has been focussed on updating the ATLAS-tile 2002 test-beam benchmark suite. Progress has been made in including Fluka in the setup, WP and AR are working on this, while Manuel Gallas has been porting the code to SLC3/gcc-3.2.3 to repeate the measures with the latest Geant4 version. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Generator services - Paolo - Manpower: the current GENSER integrator is S.Slabospitsky; he will be replaced as shifter by M.Kirsanov. S.Belov is the current MCDB shifter, will be replaced by L.Dudko. - L.Dudko, M.Kirsanov and PB will attend at the Les Houches workshop. - The last Generator Services meeting was dedicated to the MC framework and MCDB. The was a report on MCDB, which now can be used but still requiress external testing (news are expected from the Les Houches meeting) - GENSER: o The new release 1.0.0 of GENSER was annunced on March 29th, a problem with the initial installation of the libraries in the LCG area was fixed (some libraries were missing). o A standard build procedure needs to be established still, also for what concerns the possibility to provide a "light" packaging system. o There are plans to include the "Black-Hole" Monte Carlo (generation of black-holes states, quantum gravity, ...) as requested by LHCb; the authors have been contacted. Other MCs are in plan to be included. - Production Framework: not ready yet; a Beta release is a milestone for end of June; the current prototype is not strictly following the design and there are some dependencies on the CMS software that must be resolved, mainly due to the fact that HepMC was not adopted since the beginning. Three months is the time-scale for having the Beta release. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Fluka - Alfredo [offline report by AF] The activity on FLUKA in the last month was focussed on: - Cleanup, bug fix and benchmarking of the new PEMF-free version; - Activities required for the release, in particular code cleanup and reorganization; - (a lot of) activity aimed at defining the final license for the release; - Progress on the radioactive decay online treatment. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation framework - Witek - GDML: the planned reoganisation of the packages and the overall build infrastructure have been implemented. All this and the extensions to the GDML schema are included in the new version 2.1.0 released on April 27th. External contribution from SLAC for a setup using 'autoconf' has been received and commited to the repository, it will be included in the next release. - GDML has been included in official LCG installation area. - A set of three examples demonstrating the usage of Python with Geant4 has been implemented and is now available from the web site: http://lcgapp.cern.ch/project/simu/framework Example-1 shows how to create the dictionary for G4 classes and to run the simulation directly from Python; Example-2 shows a simulation interfaced through Python to GDML via the Geant4 reader; Example-3 shows how to run a Geant4 simulation (with GDML geometry) though Python together with Root visualisation and histograming. - Continuation in PyReflex is felt very useful for the work in simulation framework. - A request for a technical student on GDML will be reiterated for September. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Geant4 - John - A new development release of Geant4 has been made available on Friday April 29th. The new release includes developments mainly in the geometry (new generic twisted-trap and twisted-trd solids, and improved voxelisation mechanism to address local re-optimisation of geometries for dynamic setups), EM physics and visualization modules. All the developments will be included in the scheduled minor release 7.1 of June. - A tutorial of Geant4 will be given at CERN in May 25-27th (see http://cern.ch/geant4/meetings/school2005), at the moment more than 30 people have registered (15 from LHC experiments, the rest externals). - Geant4 was well represented at the Monte Carlo 2005 Topical Meeting in Chattanooga, which saw several presentations about Geant4 and MCNP applications. - There's a renewed interest in using Geant4 with CAD systems (interest was expressed by ATLAS), concerning the description of the support structures to be included for radiation studies, and verifying effects especially on the muon chambers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Garfield - Rob - Two milestones scheduled for the first quarter of 2005 have been achieved. * Interfaces with Maxwell 2D (Ansoft) and FEMLAB, interface for Tosca: additional Vector Fields formats have been added on the way. There is also other new functionality added, in particular regarding the gradient calculation for all shape functions currently in use. * Diffusion in strongly converging and diverging fields (GEM and Micromegas): available in test version - Activity has started on the new gas cross-sections and new Monte Carlo simulation for Gauss transport. - Garfield has been ported on MacOSX 10.3. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== AOB - Compilers: porting on the gcc-3.4.3 compiler suite must be considered with priority by the sub-projects that did not verify it yet. Authors of the Fortran packages should also be made aware of the problems that may raise with the transition to the new gcc-4.X compilers series. - Next meeting will be in one month.