Simulation Project Leaders Meeting 19-June-2007 ==== Attendees John Apostolakis (JA), Alfredo Ferrari (AF), Pere Mato (PM), Witek Pokorski (WP), Alberto Ribon (AR), Gabriele Cosmo (GC). Excused: Rob Veenhof (RV). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Minutes - Quarterly Reports: o The 2nd quarter 2007 activity reports must be prepared by end of June. - Students: o Zoltan Torzsok (technical student) and Marc Montull (summer student) assigned to the Simulation Framework subproject for work on GDML and FLUGG will start on July 1st. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation physics validation - Alberto - Meetings: o In the Physics Validation meeting held in May there was a presention from CMS on the combined ECAL/HCAL for 2004/06 test beam; it was reported a difference in response for low energy pions between data and Geant4 simulation. The low energy parametrized model (LEP) could be responsible for such difference, but also the assumption of no Birks quenching could have an impact. Further investigations are needed. o In the Physics Validation meeting of june 20th there will be an update from CMS in the shower shapes studies. - Simple benchmarks: o It was found an agreement in the next thin-target benchmark to do, i.e. use the Helios data for diffraction in proton-nucleus collisions. - Extension of ATLAS TileCal 2002 analysis with Fluka: o A meeting was hold on May 10th with Fluka experts and another will take place on June 19th where technical details like the selection of cuts will be discussed. o In order to complete the analysis, different beam energies have to be studied still, where beam contamination must be considered; the analysis was done already in 2003 using Geant4 5.2, the new analysis now taked into account more effects; one of the outcomes of this is that there is now more agreement for the shower shapes study as observed in the other test-beam analyses. - Other experimental groups have been contacted to repeat the test-beam exercise using the Fluka extension. A positive answer has come from ATLAS HEC and a meeting will be held in October to define the plan. Interest has also been expressed in CMS but for the time being no manpower can be assigned to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Generator services - Witek - Meetings: o The 2nd planning meeting was held in May. The meeting had a positive outcome and positive feedback came from the 3 experiments using the new setup and the stake-holders. There was a request from LHCb to provide Windows binaries. The strategy followed for the generation of new tests and validation has been widely approved and appreciated. No major changes in the planning; will keep on installing new versions of the various MC generators as they will come available; new tests will be implemented according to the needs. Manpower from the project will be also devoted to provide some contribution in the experiments for the validation and integration of the generators. WP in person will help ATLAS in the maintenance of the Photos interface. The detailed minutes of the meeting are available on the web o Monthly meeting: there was an ATLAS talk by J.Butterworth on tuning of generations; a talk by L.Garren on new features in HepPDT, now becoming more close to what people want to have; A.Toropin presented the current status of GENSER. - GENSER: o The implementation of all tests requested by LHCb (15 tests for Pythia, B-physics specific) has been completed; some of the tests produce distributions; comparison between distributions will be soon done automatically and posted on the web page. o New versions added for some generators. List always available on the web page. - Manpower: o A.Toropin stays till the end of June; O.Zanin will take over in July. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Fluka - Alfredo - Meeting: o A course has been taken in Houston in May. The format of the course has been largely renewed, making it more user-friendly and organising exercise sessions addressing a specific problem and adding features incrementally. The course was held in the computer center of the Houston University; the attendance has been of 32-33 students, ~70% americans with several contractors from NASA. A questionnaire was distributed at the end to collect information and for future improvements. o A new course will take place in Legnaro (Italy) in Mid-October. o Also trying to organise sort of "running" courses at CERN (on specific topics), attached to the traditional Fluka meeting. Already taken three lectures. - Fluka: o An interim release Fluka-2006b took place in mid of March. The GUI interface 'Flair' Python based is now available. So far about 600 downloads of the new GUI package; many users from China and India, from where also requests to give courses have been received. o It was noted more and more users using the code for applications which are between scientific use and/or commercial; a typical situation are consultants. Perhaps relaxing the license in this respect is a solution to best deal with these cases. o INFN is now starting a project of treatment planning for radiotherapy; the idea is to exploit the existing expertise in physics and in the biology. Involvement in this kind of activity is foreseen. o Physics developments: annihilation photons; trying readapting what developed 10 year ago for neutrino beams. o The Fluka installation on the AFS external area will be available soon in the next days. - Manpower: o New CERN fellow (awarded after completion of the PHD) starting on July 1st, in collaboration with several other labs for work on neutron beams. o New fellow also obtained for studies on Beta beams. o Getting a technical student for web site and maintenance work. o A lot of work with LHC related activities; expressing concern for the fact that the team is far from dedicating the planned full 1.5 FTE to core development. o A working group has been setup by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and it was asked to have representatives of Fluka part of this group. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation framework - Witek - Flugg: o Used regularly for the TileCal study. o Will certainly profit of having Fluka installed in the external AFS area. o WP and the new assigned technical student will be working on Flugg for update, development and maintenance. - GDML: o No progress so far. In the to-do list: extensions to the schema for new solids; bug fix in the Root interface and Geant4 plugin. - Persistency: o The feature of persistency of pointers in Root has been recently implemented and now needs to be verified. It will allow to import/export Geant4 geometries in binary mode without requiring further code modifications in the Geant4 side.. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Geant4 - John - Meetings: o There was an Oversight Board last Tuesday, where the proposal for having Fermilab joining Geant4 has been accepted. Roughly 2 FTEs for 6 people will be dedicated to work in hadronic validation, performance optimisation and Q/A. o The Geant4 school took place in Paris in June; attendance of 104 people with also presentations from advanced users. A big contribution was coming from medical and space communities; roughly 20% the attendance from HEP users. There have been several requests for developments focussed in improving the use of Geant4 for scan geometries (merging of materials in voxel geometries). o Another Geant4 course was held in Jefferson Lab in May with the participation of the Geant4 US colleagues. o The planning for the September Geant4 Workshop in Hebden Bridge is now in advanced state. o The locations for the next two Geant4 Collaboration Workshops is already known: in October 2008 the Workshop will be in Kobe (Japan); in 2009 it will be in Catania (Italy). o To be scheduled a Technical Forum at CERN in July. - Releases: o Feedback from ATLAS on 8.3. Problems reported for 8.2 have been solved; a new issue in using the field with very conservative values was observed; a protection which was added in 8.3 seems to be causing troubles when very high precision (nanometer scale) is requested in the tracker. A patch fixing the problem (and included in release 9.0) has been provided. o Release 9.0 is scheduled for Friday, June 29th; eight candidate tags have been tested so far. The new release shows some CPU improvement over 8.3 and a greater stability. Some migration may be required for advance users: use of the geometry tolerance can now be relative to the geometry topology; fast-simulation/scoring when using parallel geometries, now using the new parallel navigation mechanism available as option in release 8.2; advanced selection of physics parameters. The second revision of the Fritiof model is included in 9.0; this model is now used in FTFP physics lists down to 5 GeV; the too high diffraction ratio observed in 8.3 is now reduced in 9.0 with also quasi-elastic physics activated to compensate. A new error-propagation module (Geant4e) is now integrated in Geant4. The last candidate tag has been made available on AFS for use by the experiments. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Garfield - Rob (offline report) - Radiation: o Focus on comparing neutron levels in the CMS cavern published earlier with the levels predicted by Fluka; the files run correctly, the interpretation of the neutron levels needs further work. o The CMS beam condition monitor is starting to be studied with Fluka. - Gas detectors: o Graduate lecture series given in Cagliari (25/5 to 4/6). o Work going on SRIM interface. - NA60: o Thesis defense in Lisboa (19/6). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== AOB Next meeting scheduled for September 25th.