Public minutes of 121st SB meeting on July 20th, 2020

Present: Soon Yung Jun, Alberto Ribon, Alex Howard, Marc Verderi, Francesco Romano, Koichi Murakami, Gunter Folger,Dennis Wright, Makoto Asai, Ivana Hrivnacova, Daren Sawkey, Ben Morgan, Gabriele Cosmo, John Allison (OB Liaison), Mihaly Novak, Vladimir Ivanchenko, Luciano Pandola
Excused: Hisaya Kurashige, Laurent Garnier, Witold Pokorski

1. Online Collaboration Meeting

It is reminded the Collaboration Meeting will be online only, with two hours of plenary sessions per day, plus parallel sessions organized by category coordinators. The Program Committee was in charge of the plenary sessions and was formed of Anna Zaborowska, Ben Morgan, Laurent Garnier, Shogo Okada (+ex officio Alberto Ribon, Marc Verderi). It met on 18th, 25th of June & 2nd of July. It identified two topics on which a special focus should be made:

  • Welcoming the new generation of developers : how to make the Collaboration more attractive and more friendly to newcomers ?
  • What features can be identified for the next release in 2021, expected to be a major one.

Members participate from worldwide locations, constraining very much the plenary sessions time slot. This one has been chosen such that, worldwide, the sessions start after 6:00 AM and ends before 1:00 AM, which limtis to the 15:00 - 17:00 CEST time slot.

Plenary session will be recorded, videos will be kept internal to the Collaboration, to avoid legal difficulties.

The Indico agenda will be circulated shortly. It will contain the plenary sessions, and parallel sessions will be continuously added to it.

2. Focus on bug reports

A focus had been made on bug reports, up to reports from May 2020. About 30 reports could be examined, among which few (O(5)) are now fixed, few (O(5)) will be closed because of absence of user’s feedback for months, few (O(5)) can not be reproduced, quite many (O(10)) are more requests for enhancement than real bugs, and a few (O(5)) are real bugs.

3. Regular items

A round table of the working group activities has been made, together with a review of the User’s Requirements, and of the pending Steering Board actions. No special point needed to be brought for what physics performances are considered. For computing performance a false 30% speed-up in ref05 for EMZ physics lists has been understood and fixed in ref06.

4. Status of next release

The beta release was issued on time. The new tasking model was exercised and reviewed but not integrated yet. Some issues are under investigation. Basic examples have been migrated, the other examples will follow.

5. Events

  • Past events:
    • No past events to report on
  • Future events:
    • [Virtual] Geant4 Advanced Course @ CERN, 28 September - 2 October 2020.
      • Confirmed. Full attendance foreseen.
    • 9th International Geant4 School, Catania (Italy), 4-9 October 2020.
      • Confirmed, at least with local students
    • 4th LPCC (LHC Physics Center at CERN) detector simulation workshop, 2-3 November 2020
      • Confirmed

6. AOB

  • The Geant4 web site migration to Drupal 8 is under way, and is taken care by Gunter Folger.
  • The possibility to open the testing shifts to non steering board members, in particular to young members as they have often solid skills on modern tools (e.g Git), on a voluntary basis, with agreement of related working group coordinators has been discussed.
  • The SWIFT-HEP project (UK), on which Benjamin Morgan has a strong lead, in under application and has received support ”For the Geant4 Collaboration and Task Force for R\&D”, and from the HSF.

Meeting Date

Monday, July 20, 2020 - 12:00