Simulation Project Leaders Meeting 19-June-2008 ==== Attendees John Apostolakis (JA), Alberto Ribon (AR), Pere Mato (PM), Gabriele Cosmo (GC). Excused: Alfredo Ferrari (AF). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Minutes - Quarterly reports for first and second quarters 2008 have been prepared and sent to management. - A minor LCG review will take place beginning of July, expected short summary report for the last 6 months activity in the Simulation. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation physics validation & framework - Alberto - Meetings: o In the Physics Validation meeting of June 18th there has been a presentation from the HARP-CDP group reporting about two problems in the Geant4 simulation discovered in their analysis, an unphysical peak on polar angle distribution for protons, and diffraction-like pattern for pions. The following discussion and presentation by V.Uzhinskiy reported that the peak being due to a problem in quasi-elastic and has been fixed in the Fritiof and QGS model families by adding Fermi motion; the fixes are already included in Geant4 9.1.p02. Issues are still affecting the parameterised models which are also used within most of the theory-driven physics-lists in the energy range of interest for HARP. As far the other problem is concerned (diffraction-like pattern for pions) is due still to the parameterised models but is not yet understood; it seems originated in hadron-nucleon interactions; the issue is still under investigation. It turned out again that documentation for the physics-lists and their domain of applicability is definitely needed; it should be provided or anyhow improved; the ideal would be to provide an intuitive table with one line per incident particle for each physics-list showing the applicability of each model; then illustrate the available model options according to the energy range. V.Uzhinskiy presented the progress made in Fritiof, integrating the information presented by G.Folger at the last Physics Validation meeting and related to QGS. The third presentation was by V.Grichine on ionisation deposition in the ALICE/TPC, where it was shown that with the PAI model in Geant4 it is most likely possible to describe in detail this kind of physics. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Generator services - Alberto - Meetings: o The usual monthly meeting was replaced by the project planning meeting on May 23rd and the HERA LHC workshop. The next meeting will be on June 25th. o A CEDAR meeting took place on June 3rd. It was technically discussed how to use 'autotools' for building of GENSER and replacing the hand- written shell scripts for those MC missing a build system; it was also discussed the idea of adopting a bootstrap script for building the whole GENSER in a consistent way. - GENSER: o MC@NLO is now included as source code with an example; a meeting with the authors will take place on June 20th to discuss possible evolution of the package infrastructure to make it compliant with the GENSER build system. - HepMC: o Version 2.04.00 has been released. The new release is the first adopting the new release process implying discussion with MC authors and developers in dedicated forum; the release includes the announced changes in the handling of units, now forcing to use units (MeV or GeV for energy, mm or cm for length); it also clarify the PDF information to be store, being x*f(x). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Fluka - Alfredo - No report. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Geant4 - John - Feedback from experiments: o Following the issues reported by ATLAS regarding stuck tracks, a possible error condition has been identified in the G4Tubs class and a fix is currently under testing. - Releases: o A beta release (9.2-beta) of Geant4 is currently in preparation for distribution on July 4th. It will include improvements in the FTF (Fritiof) hadronic model for pion incident interactions; alternative multiple- scattering models, while the current process/model used in production will be frozen and only bug-fixes will be allowed: further refinements in the Urban model will be in a new class; an additional new experimental model separates large angles and small ones (Wentzel model); it will also include the first implementation of a GDML writer as part of the already existing GDML plugin module. - Developments: o Improvements are being tested in the pre-compound models and will be more likely part of the December release 9.2. - Meetings: o A Technical Forum meeting is scheduled for July 2nd. o A Geant4 course in French will take place at LAPP in November and will be announced soon. - Manpower: o An election for the next term of Geant4 as spokesperson is ongoing. J.Apostolakis is the only candidate. o X.Dong is visiting CERN for working on multi-core prototype of Geant4 and collaborating with OpenLab on multi-core developments. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Garfield - Rob - No report. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== AOB Next meeting scheduled for September 9th.