Simulation Project Leaders Meeting 26-May-2009 ==== Attendees John Apostolakis (JA), Alberto Ribon (AR), Gabriele Cosmo (GC). Excused: Pere Mato (PM). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Minutes --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Simulation physics validation & framework - Alberto - Meetings: o The last meeting was held on May 13th, the ILC Calice presentation has been postponed to the meeting of June 10th. One of the presentations was about the ATLAS HEC analysis made with Geant4 9.2 where also Fritiof-based physics list have been studied for the first time; the results in 9.2 compared to older releases are stable; Fritiof physics-lists behave rather satisfactorily, results are overall consistent with those obtained for the ATLAS TileCal and Combined test- beams. No one of the tested physics-lists can be considered good for all observables; QGSP-BERT is performing well overall. o The next Physics Validation meeting will be on June 10th. - Transition between hadronic models: o Some progress has been achieved for smoothing the energy response transition between the different hadronic models in Geant4; all models have been studied, looking at energy in Pi0, Pi-, Pi+, protons, neutrons and light ions; from the comparisons as function of the energy it becomes clear that the discontinuities are due to the models' intrinsic differences. Currently attempting to put together combinations of models in new lists by adapting the energy range validity in the transition region. o One new list QGSC_CHIPS has been now provided in the development branch; it provides an alternative path for improving the transition problem; the new list shows some interesting features in this respect. - FLUGG: o No progress yet. The technical student has managed to reproduce the results obtained so far in the existing test suite and is now close to start investigating the open issues. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Generator services - Alberto - Meetings: o The monthly meeting on April 8th was dedicated to MCDB, which is used by CMS as the way to save parton-level files in the Les-Houches event format and way to exchange files with other communities. o Next monthly meeting will be dedicated on HepMC and will take place on July 8th; in the agenda a preview of the next year release 2.06. o A project planning meeting will take place on May 29th, where among all things in the agenda it is foreseen also a discussion concerning the proposed steps to take regarding the forthcoming migration to use 'autotools' for the installation in GENSER. - GENSER: o The migration to SLC5 is almost completed; Tauola and Photos generators are on the way. o Some development are going on for MC@NLO, where in the new forthcoming release 3.4, a new structure is being proposed with a common library provided together with one library for every process. The new release will be integrated in GENSER as soon as available. o EvtGen: A.Ryd has completed the merging of the different branches; the new package has been handed over to LHCb for testing, bug-fixes and improvements. In few weeks this new version of EvtGen will be made available in GENSER. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Fluka - Alfredo - No report --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Geant4 - John - Releases: o 9.3-beta is in preparation and a first candidate tag is under testing. o The new Beta release will include new developments in CHIPS for protons below 300 MeV and new physics-lists; several old physics-lists will be declared obsolete and/or disabled: FTF_EMV (replacement FTFP_BERT_EMV), QGSC_EFLOW (replacement QGSC_CHIPS), QGSP_EMX (replacement QGSP_BERT_EMX), FTFC, LHEP_BERT, LHEP_BERT_HP, LHEP_PRECO_HP, QGSP_BERT_DIF, QGSP_BERT_NQE, QGSP_DIF, QGSP_EMV, QGSP_EMV_NQE, QGSP_NQE, QGSP_QEL. o Among the various new features included in 9.3-beta, to mention also developments in the GDML module where it will be possible to customise the GDML writer for schema extensions, enabling the possibility to export for instance, customised solids. - Feedback from experiments: o The issue previously reported by LHCb has been investigated by looking at the provided geometry setup and has been identified in a tiny overlap resulting from precision loss and fragile geometrical construction in the loaded geometry. o ATLAS is moving to use 9.2.p01 for their 2009 production. Optimisation studies are under way in the magnetic-field and some ATLAS specific shapes. - Meetings: o The 6th Geant4 Space Users Workshop has been held in Madrid on May 20-22nd: the focus was on the use of Geant4 in ESA, NASA and JAXA missions and studies; there have been several discussions on issues and physics developments on general and specialised topics; tools to predict the response of electronics to radiation; simulations of a biochip irradiation experiment in the ISS. There were also discussions on the use of CAD interfaces, current strengths and limitations of the solutions currently existing; although FASTRAD now imposes a limitation to 20 volumes for the free license, it seems to be the solution providing the better interface nowadays. There were also discussion for proposed contributions, including new neutron cross-section libraries created by converting JEFF, ENDF/B, GENDL, CENDL to the Geant4 neutron format; this has been communicated to the hadronic working-group and is being discussed for potential inclusion in the Geant4 distribution. o The next Geant4 Collaboration and Users Workshop will be held in Catania (Italy) in October 15-22nd (http://www.lns.infn.it/geant4/geant4ws2009/). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== Garfield - Rob - No report --------------------------------------------------------------------- ==== AOB Next meeting scheduled for June 30th.