Task Force for R&Ds
- Coordinator: Witek Pokorski (CERN)
Mandate of R&D Task Force
The role of Task Force for R&Ds is to
- Promote longer-term R&D efforts on the exploitation of emerging technologies, computing architectures or software architectural revisions, and new or better physics ideas that would be beneficial to Geant4.
- Make timely assessments on these R&Ds for their feasibility, benefits and required efforts.
Main Development Axes
The Task Force has identified three development axis that should be followed in order to evolve Geant4 to meet the requirements of the forthcoming experiments:
- Improvement, optimization, modernization and refactoring of the existing Geant4 code
- Development and integration of fast simulation techniques
- Investigation of the potential use of accelerators
R&D Activities
Ongoing R&D activities currently include:
- AdePT - Accelerated detector Particle Transport
- G4HepEm
- Celeritas
- Machine Learning-based fast simulation tools
Former R&D investigations included:
- Single precision usage in simulation components
- Full integration of Opticks with Geant4 (code available, maintenance only)
- Geant4 task-based prototype (in production)
- Stateless Geant4 prototype (first phase completed)
- Instruction and data cache optimizations (first phase completed)
- GPU-based simplified simulation prototypes (completed)
- GPU vendor libraries in particle transport (currently on hold)
- Portability frameworks for accelerator-based particle transport (currently on hold)
- Electromagnetic shower parametrisation
- Validation tools for fast simulation of electromagnetic showers
The progress in the different R&D activities is reported regularly at the Geant4 Technical Forum meetings. The links to the former Task Force meetings can be found here.
FTE Count and Projects Assessment
In December 2021, the Steering Board agreed to apply the following regulation for FTE count and projects assessment.