Simulation Project Leaders Meeting 16-December-2008 ==== Attendees John Apostolakis (JA), Alberto Ribon (AR), Gabriele Cosmo (GC), Pere Mato (PM). Excused: Alfredo Ferrari (AF). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Minutes - Alberto Ribon will be leaving CERN as of June 2009. The Simulation Project is now left in a very critical situation concerning the manpower; current and future planned activities will have to be reviewed and adapted as consequence. Currently seeking for solutions to replace Alberto. - A new fellow has been assigned to Geant4 for working on Physics Validation and will start from July 2009. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation physics validation & framework - Alberto - Meetings: o In the Physics Validation meeting of December 3rd, S.Banjeree presented the latest results on the validation of hadron shower simulation from the H2 TB Setup of the CMS Calorimeter; the most interesting results of the analysis concerns the Fritiof-based physics-lists; the best performing configuration has demonstrated FTFP_BERT, while FTF_BIC performs similar to QGSP_BERT; it was also noted that no kink at 12 GeV was observed using FTF, confirming what was observed already in simplified setups studies and contradicting what observed by a previous ATLAS analysis (indicating that the artifact observed may be something specific to their simulation). The summary of the CMS analysis indicates the Fritiof lists as quite promising over all, also because not showing any transition problem around 10 GeV, as observed in other lists. - GDML (Geometry Description Markup Language): o A new version of GDML (3_0_0) is released together with Geant4 9.2. It includes updates to the GDML schema (descriptions with units for all parameterised volume types, addition of elliptical-cone shape and addition of handling of variables in loops). The obsolete I/O modules and related configuration/build setup for Geant4 have been removed; GDML reader and writer are now fully integrated in Geant4. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Generator services - Alberto - Meetings: o In the monthly meeting of November 5th, J.Katzy from DESY presented the MonteCarlo activities taking place in DESY and presented the "HepMC Analysis Tool", a simple tool useful for making regression testing with histograms on Generators. o The 2nd Planning meeting of 2008 was held on November 28th; AR presented the status of the project and proposed plans; the details are available in the summary document accessible from the web: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=41826 Among the various topics discussed, it was decided to have a dedicated meeting on HepMC every six months to discuss developments and releases; it was also found an agreement to use the "HepMC Analysis Tool" for regression testing in GENSER and also Rivet for more sophisticate checking and future comparison with data. o There will be a meeting on January 13th dedicated to EvtGen; a major HepMC meeting on January 28th to discuss features to be included in HepMC-2.05 (among which the addition of information regarding x-sections) o The first Generators Physics meeting will be probably held in February. - GENSER: o Autotool: the latest version of Pythia-6 has been released with autotools and provided to experiments to try out. Preliminary GENSER tests show reproducibility of results. o Three quarters of the generators in GENSER have been already tested successfully using gfortran from the gcc-4.3.2 compiler suite. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Fluka - Alfredo - No report. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Geant4 - John - Releases: o Release 9.2 is under preparation and due on December 19th. Among all features, the new release includes: final implementation of the Liege Cascade hadronic model; improvements and fixes to Bertini Cascade for quasi-elastic; complete GDML plugin for reading and writing and import of CAD STEP-tools files; new module for detector description in ASCII text format; update to PDG-2008 for particles masses and widths; new Qt GUI and visualization driver. Details can be found through the release notes available at: http://cern.ch/geant4/support/ReleaseNotes4.9.2.html o First tests show an improvement of about 25% in CPU time when using QGSP_BERT (50 GeV pi-), and a slight degradation in performance of 1-3% for QGSP_EMV. - Development highlights: o Planning of the developments for 2009 is under preparation; transition between models in the 3-15 GeV energy range is one of the main topics concerning hadronic physics and validation. - Feedback from experiments: o Both ATLAS and CMS are planning to use release 9.2 for their future productions; first tests by ATLAS to the candidate release have identified a couple of issues, which will be resolved in the final version, one of this related to a problem occurring when using the new locator algorithm for computing intersections in field. o ATLAS also reports that by locking a process to a single CPU, they managed to have more stable CPU timing on Intel architectures, apparently solving issues related to the use of the processor 2nd-level cache. - Meetings: o A Steering Board meeting was held last week and dedicated to the preparation for the Delta review in program for January 19-20th. o Two sets of training courses were held at LAPP in November, each one with 30 students participating. The courses were done in French and the attendees had a broad spectrum of field, from nuclear, to astrophysics, from HEP to medical physics. o It has been asked to participate in a benchmark exercise for neutron spallation and accelerator-driven systems at the AIEA in Vienna. The results of the benchmark are due in January and should be reviewed in May. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Garfield - Rob - No report. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== AOB Next meeting scheduled for February 10th.