Present:

CERN: John Apostolakis (JA, chairman), Gabriele Cosmo (GC), Albert De Roeck (ADR), Hisaya Kurasige (HK), Vladimir Ivantchenko (VI), Maria Grazia Pia (MGP), Florence Ranjard (FR), Sergey Sadilov (SS), Maya Stavrianakou (MS).

KEK: Katsuya Amako (KA)

Helsinki: Aatos Heikinnen (AH)

LAPP: Michel Maire (MM)

Naruto: Hajime Yoshida (HY)

QinetiQ, UK: Peter Truscott (PT)

SLAC: Makoto Asai (MA), Dennis Wright (DW), Joseph Perl (JP)

TRIUMF: Peter Gumplinger (PG)

Excused:

Gunter Folger

Minutes: G.Cosmo, V.Ivantchenko - 2 March 2006

Revision: J. Apostolakis - 7 March 2006

Part I - Final Technical Steering Board of G4-MoU

Notes: G.Cosmo

Initial items

• Notes of November 10^th TSB meeting require some corrections before final approval. JA and PT will take care.
• Actions:
  • Actions completed: 27.4, 27.6, 28.6, 30.4, 32.4, 33.3, 33.6, 34.1, 34.4, 34.5, 35.3, 35.4, 35.5, 36.1, 36.2, 36.3, 37.1, 37.2, 37.5.
  • New actions: 38.1, 38.2, 38.3, 38.4, 38.5, 38.6, 38.7.

Reports from Technical Forum, member institutes, experiments

• Usage of Geant4 versions in the experiments:
  • LHCb currently using version 7.1.p01 in production. There are no plans to switch to version 8.0.p01 for DC06. Are anyhow interested to any fix/patch which could be applied to the 7.1 series.
  • CMS has been using version 6.2.p02 for the last production. Currently phasing out this version in order to migrate to version 8.0.p01 after integration in the new framework. Currently using version 7.1.p01 for SUSY studies.
• Reports:
  • Latest minimum-bias production in CMS has been affected by a longstanding bug in the Geant4 hadronic code (GEISHA). The effects of the bug which is now fixed in release 8.0, were originally observed by ATLAS in February 2005 and a problem report was opened. The problem, which can be very easily reproduced, has now been analysed and understood in the detail; now currently looking in CMS to the produced events in order to understand the effects and determine required corrections.
  • Verbosity in the hadronic code seems to be an issue in production runs in CMS; too different verbosity levels apply to the different physics models and processes. It is required uniformity and an easy way to customise the verbosity.
• Technical Forum:
  • The last meeting was hold at CERN on February 7^th, no major issues raised. It has been decided to hold the next meeting in three weeks time, once the complete work plan for 2006 drafted by the Geant4 Collaboration will be available.
  • By the the next meeting, it is necessary to review all open requirements and cleanup the list. ADR and JA will take care of this.
  • Participants to the Forum should be also encouraged to raise any issue which is felt important, like... critical developments or bugs reported and not yet addressed.

Assessing user input on key issues

• JA briefly reported about key issues and priorities expressed and collected from the past Technical Fora. The different areas being:
  • Performance (CPU/physics)
  • Ion-ion physics for space applications
  • CAD input and interface to Geant4 geometries
  • Requirements from medical applications: physics precision, capability to deal with large geometries, Bremsshtralung splitting, etc...

Workplan for 2006

• The workplans for 2006 of the various working-groups have been presented, following the Category-Coordinators meeting hold on February 8^th, where all work-items were drafted.
• GC will now collect all the development items and publish them in a page which will include also the release plan scheduled for 2006. Category Coordinators who did not specify yet the quarter for the deliverables, are invited to do so and provide this information to GC.
• JA will summarise in a note the "non-development" items for 2006.
• Proposed publication on Physics Configuration:
  Action: JA to determine people/volunteers who can act as editors for the proposed publication on Physics Configurations.
• EM workplans:
  • Better communication regarding the activities in the standard and low-energy working groups is encouraged.
• Hadronic workplan:
  • ADR stressed the importance of having the participation of the Geant4 hadronic WG coordinator or anyhow a representative at the Simulation Validation meetings hold at CERN by A.Ribon. A proper time to allow for VRVS connection with SLAC can certainly be agreed.
• UI workplan:
  • The new Python interface module has been committed in the CVS repository and will be available in the next reference tag.
  • Some concerns were expressed at the last Category Coordinators meeting about the proposal for a GUI desktop included in the plan.
    Action: HY to prepare presentation for the next CC/SB meeting about the design study on UI-VIS joint GUI desktop.
• Visualization workplan:
  • JP will distribute to the CC mailing list the proposal for extensions to the vis system to allow for full support of visualization of Boolean solids.
• Testing and QA workplan:
  • Action: SS, GF and TS to define a plan of action for the migration of Bugzilla to KEK with clear responsibilities assigned for the maintenance of the tool.
• Software Management workplan:
  • Clarification is needed concerning the support of the Intel/icc compiler. Since release 7.1, Geant4 has supported and regularly tested on Intel/icc-8.0. Now it is no longer possible, due to CLHEP (where the compiler is not recognised in the new configuration system); the new series (9.X) of the compiler is now out, but is not available at CERN.
• Documentation workplan:
  • Adoption of DocBook and Doxygen is under discussion.

AOB

• PT reported about the activities currently going at QinetiQ in conjunction with ESA:
  • Development of Geant4-based application on Windows in the context of the Mulassis project.
  • Integration of the GRAS application into the interactive web facility SPENVIS.
• Witold Pokorski (CERN) has been proposed as the new coordinator for the "persistency" category of Geant4, replacing GC as interim coordinator. Witek has already some duties in Geant4 as the maintainer of the GDML extended example and also contributed in the recent extensions included in release 8.0 to solids/volumes/materials for allowing direct object-persistency of detector descriptions. Witek is also the main developer and contact person of the GDML project at CERN.

Part II - Transitional CA-Steering Board

Notes: V.Ivantchenko

A. User-Relation issues

• According to the Collaboration Agreement (CA) users will be not represented in the new Steering Board (SB). Significant part of the interactions with the users will be carried out via the Technical Forum meetings. This will require more work in advance for the preparation of each scheduled meeting.
• Action: GF to create a new mailing list geant4-sb@cern.ch including all members of the transitional Steering Board (collaborator members of the MoU era TSB).

B. Transition to new Collaboration Structure

• MGP and KA proposed to organize a special workshop/meeting dedicated to agreeing on proposed Geant4 license(s), and to revising the internal organization structure and regulations. The revisions to be discussed will concern internal Collaboration issues, and the structures of the Collaboration Agreement will be preserved.
  Topics are to be prepared, with wide consultation, in order to enable constructive dialog and convergence on the topics. Participation must be representative, but limited enough to ensure effective discussion and convergence to a proposal for the Collaboration to endorse.
  Noting concerns regarding additional travel (financial and other), and interest for remote participation it was proposed to hold the meeting in Europe.
  A decision regarding this emerging proposal for a meeting will await the circulation and discussion of a detailed proposal, and depends on agreeing on the mandate, process and timescale of the proposed meeting.
• Action:Katsuya to circulate a proposal for the mandate, process of a workshop/meeting on the license and internal organisation.
• Noted that the mandate of the transitional-Steering Board (provided by the MoU-TSB) started on January 27th and is scheduled to last three months. The mission during this transition period includes the election of WG representatives to the SB, forming the new Steering Board, and organising the elections of the Chair of the Steering Board.
• It was confirmed that the creation of the SB, as foreseen in the CA and by the TSB, will proceed. In addition the implementation of other actions needed for the transition period, will be scheduled and performed. A potential exception is under consideration regarding the election of the SB chair (by the collaboration) in case the date workshop/meeting is scheduled in the near future (first half of 2006.)
  The exact process and the timetable were not discussed.

C. Collaboration License

• JA asked for feedback on the recently circulated list of the Geant4 contributors (and license holders) in order to prepared a second version for circulation in the collaboration and amongst departed contributors.
• CHEP06 participants reported on talk by mySQL, which combines an open source license (available for all) and a commercial license on terms more adapted for business uses. This demonstrated the ability of license holders to provide their product with different licenses. Such a multiple license solution, can include an open source license and a separate license can be applied for different communities (eg commercial companies).
• Action: Category coordinators to provide revisions (if not done yet) to JA for the list of the Geant4 lasting contributors for their category.

D. Regular items

• The date of the Collaboration workshop has been fixed to the second week of October. The proposals for working sessions and volunteers are requested.
• CALOR 2006 and SATIF 2006 conferences were discussed. MA mentions that all open source codes contribute to SATIF by submitting their results, the same need to be done by Geant4.
• The contributions to major conferences in 2006 of the Geant4 Physics groups are required as well as contributions from the comparison projects.

E. Open Issues

• Source data libraries: contacting, adding further acknowledgements.
• Geant4 derived data libraries: clarifying use conditions or related requirements.
• Issues with physics lists: documentation.

F. AOB

• Proposed to organize next SB at the last week of April.
• The deployment of the new Geant4 web page was discussed:
  • Guidance how to revise existing pages and implement new pages in the new web scheme is required.
  • Public minutes of the SB should not link to protected pages.
  • Thanks to the designers of the new page was collectively expressed.
• Action: DW and GF to provide guidelines and short explanation how to implement or revise pages according to the style and spirit of the new web site.