Collaboration Internal Minutes of 131st Steering Board, 9 December 2022

Submitted by mverderi on

Present: Alberto, Susanna, Mihaly, Gabriele, Makoto (OB liaison), Jonas (ECRC representative), Marc, Soon, Vladimir, Ivana, Ben, Alex, Witek, Dennis, John, Dmitri

Excused: Luciano

0. Concerns with respect to the international situation

No problem to report; moreover, a few Russian collaborators were able to work on Geant4 at CERN for a few months, until middle of December.

1. Status of 11.1

The new release, 11.1, was published in time, on Friday, December 9th.
The release process was quite smooth, with only some fixes to the CLHEP library for compilation warnings on macOS.

One reminder: when we are in the release phase, it would be good that everyone in the Collaboration verifies that things work fine with their applications using the provided candidate releases, in order to report for any problem before the release is out !

2. Regular items

2.1 Status of open requirements and open Steering Board actions:

  • On-going, with nothing particular to report.
  • For what concerns the requirements collected during the 2022 Collaboration Meeting, Marc Verderi will prepare a similar table as for 2021, with requirements per domain, with some person dedicated to each domain to investigate further these requirements.

2.2 Physics performance issues:

  • http://geant-val.cern.ch/
  • Dmitri Konstantinov takes over from Mihaly Novak the coordination of the Physics Validation Task Force.
  • Lorenzo Pezzotti will be Dmitri's deputy.
  • Plan to organize a discussion at the beginning of 2023 to see how to proceed.

2.3 Computing performance issues

  • https://g4cpt.fnal.gov/g4p/admin/reportSB.html
  • A summary of computing performance for the Geant4 version 11.1 with respect to 11.0 (and patches):
    • CPU performance is very similar in most of tested samples;
    • ~5% memory footprint increases in most of samples;
    • ~5% CPU improvements in hadron samples with HP and Shielding physics lists;
    • ~5% CPU degradation in hadron samples with INCL++. 

2.4 Internal development issues (issues stored on Gitlab):

  • For tasks updates after the release with next milestone: please go through and review!
  • We would like to use Issues/Project board to track work items for 2023 if possible - to be reviewed in early 2023.

2.5 Update on publications, conference presentations and proceedings:

  • Few papers revised.
  • Action item on Marc Verderi: to restart the turn-over of publication board membership.
  • Susanna ends her term.
  • Marc will contact some possible candidates.

2.6 Open bug reports

3. Continuation of feedback on proposals made at the Collaboration Meeting

  • Early Career Researcher Committee
    • The ECRC Kick-off meeting was held on December 7th
      • 12 persons attended.
    • Definition of who is a member of the committee:
      • all Ph.D. students;
      • all members with last degree obtained less than 10 years ago;
      • new members of Geant4 who joined the Collaboration in the last 2-3 years;
      • note that no one is forced to belong to the committee.
    • It is proposed that Contributors are also part of the ECRC
      • BTW : do we have a clear definition of a contributor ?
        • A definition was included in the LHCC document prepared in 2021;
        • The definition is expressed also in a dedicated page in the new website.
        • Should the definition be added to a future revision of the collaboration agreement ?
    • The ECRC proposes to help with information of grants relevant to young members, etc.
    • It could help with learning how the collaboration and collaboration tools work
      • Ben Morgan agreed to help on this with some presentation.
    • We will wait for 2023 census data, and then, based on these, invite people to join; then elect chair and deputy for one year:
    • The election of the chair happens each year;
      • Chair attends the SB meetings;
      • Seek for Geographical diversity.
  • Forming a new Task Force to examine further proposals:
    • This TF is dedicated to considering proposals of "second" category, as reported at the Collaboration Meeting at Rennes.
    • Proposal for the TF members:
      • Members: Anna (coordinator), Gabriele, Ben, Susanna, Shogo, Lorenzo, Jonas, Mihaly, Luciano, Makoto.
      • We would like to finalize the list of members of this new Task Force by January 2023.
  • Internal web pages:
    • It is proposed to have web pages closed to the Collaboration, these could be useful to
      • advertise the Working Group meetings,
      • internal seminars,
      • minutes of the Steering Board,
      • etc.
    • It might be doable in Jekyll, but investigation is needed.
      • One possibility would be to use a dedicated Gitlab repository - similar to geant4-dev - as it has the necessary access restrictions.
        • Agreed as the way forward.
        • This can be used also for internal minutes of the Steering Board meetings, in replacement id Drupal.
    • For the time being, Collaboration internal information will be distributed by the Collaboration mailing list.
      • Announcements will need to be circulated to the Collaboration notices for seminars, Steering Board agenda and links.
      • Regarding announcing WG meetings this way, some refinement is still needed to avoid "spamming" the collaboration (with their announcements).

4. Status of the new website

  • Content is in a state ready for release.
  • Drupal site "backed up", but need to work with CERN IT to finalize this and swap to new site.
  • Time constraints imply that the switch to the new website will be done early in 2023 (likely during the week of 9-13 January).
  • New webmaster: Ben Morgan will undertake this, in lieu of a volunteer (ideally an ECR).
    • Ben reminded that each collaboration member is expected to contribute to the Geant4 website !
  • Makoto Asai reminded that we need a new location to archive the old (HyperNews) User Forum, linked from the new website.
    • Agreed with Ben to find a place in the new website (in January)
  • John Apostolakis volunteers to aid putting a banner in the old pages that will point to the new pages.

5. Collaboration Matters

  • 2023 Census and work plan
    • Do we go for a Google questionnaire again ?
      • The experience of using this new approach in 2021 has show some difficulty from surprise/unexpected declarations of FTEs by members without prior discussion with the corresponding working group coordinators.
      • However, this new approach shows clear benefit of collecting information in one spreadsheet (rather than through many emails).
      • Sharing the Google spread sheet with working group coordinators would solve the issue of surprise.
    • Adding a contribution in an unrelated working group will be treated as a typo / misunderstanding, to avoid extra follow-up effort by working group coordinators.
    • We should ask members to double check their proposed working group contributions
      • And contact the working group coordinators in advance in case they wish to contribute in a new, unexpected area.
    • Problem of late and very late answers remains - long tails.
    • Adding a conditional question for ECRs will be appreciated.
    • We need to be careful about forwarding the link of the Google questionnaire, because the link is public.
    • The management and the working group coordinators should remember to forward this link to the new candidate collaborators who are not yet in the Geant4 mailing list.
    • Membership renewal:
    • Proposed to finish by January 22nd 2023 (Sunday).

6. AOB

6.1 Events

  • Past events:
    • 4th Geant4 International User Conference at the Physics-Medicine-Biology Frontier, Napoli (Italy), 24-26 October 2022
      • very successful event with more than 90 participants,
      • 13 contributions selected to publish in a special issue of Physica Medica;
      • very active conference;
      • for the first time, the slides are available in the Indico agenda.
    • 26th International Conference on the Application of Accelerators in Research & Industry, October 30 to November 3, 2022, Hilton Embassy Suites in Denton, Texas, USA
      • Comparison of simulation tools, including MCNP and Geant4.
      • Next conference will be in 2024; Geant4 to be the featured simulation tool.
    • [Virtual] Geant4 Advanced Course @ CERN, 10-14-October 2022
      • Afternoon sessions, 74 people registered (plus 29 in waiting list), 65 connected online in average.
        • Material and video recordings are publicly available (links to video recordings restricted).
      • We are considering mixed (in person + virtual) courses in 2023 (at least for the Beginners course), to provide more interaction and immediate feedback to lecturers.
    • 9th International Geant4 Tutorial in Korea, KISTI/Daejeon, Dec. 5-9, 2022
      • 50 attendees;
    • expect a course next year.
  • Next events:
    • OB meeting, February 1st, 2023, 14:00 - 16:00 CET (closed meeting).
    • Geant4 Technical Forum on Thursday, February 2nd, 2023, 16:00-19:00 (CET).
    • CHEP 2023, May (Virginia, USA) - deadline for contributions was in November.
      • Geant4 contributions include:
        • Tuning of model parameters (Julia).
        • Optical photon simulation (Hans Wenzel).
        • EM group (Vladimir).
        • Analysis (Ivana).
        • Simulation on GPUs (Andrei, Witek).
        • Fast simulation with ML (Anna, Dalila).
      • Geant4 Collaboration Meeting 2023 - dates are now fixed.
        • Add 3 days tutorial for Medical in parallel.
        • The time required to approve visas for some countries is now much longer - please check Japanese government website.

6.2 New collaborators:

  • Proposed by Vladimir Ivanchenko on December 7th
    • Fada Guan (deadline for comments: December 21st);
    • Jay Archer (deadline for comments: December 30th).
  • Proposed by Alberto Ribon on December 9th
    • Gabrielle Hugo (deadline for comments: December 23rd)
  • Proposed by Soon Yung Jun on December 15th
    • Eunju Jeon (deadline for comments: December 29th).

6.3 New contributors

  • None.

6.4 AOB

  • Nothing.
Meeting Date