lhcb-cb GEANT4 MoU
From:
Date: 11/27/98
Time: 8:55:08 PM
Remote Name: 137.138.115.189
Remote User: lhcb
Comments
Dear Collaboration board member,
GEANT4 is a successor of GEANT3 developed as an LHC R&D programme by
the RD44 collaboration. It is built on Object Oriented Technology and
about 100 people from over 40 institutes contributed.
The collaboration believes that the programme is ready for release
and its user support, maintenance and future development should now be
considered. Since experts are all over the world, it is considered that
no single institute or laboratory can provide the user support and
maintenance. Therefore, it was proposed that a GEANT4 collaboration to
be formed with a Memorandum of Understanding signed by participating
institutes and experiments. Participants are obliged to provide manpower
to take some responsibilities in the user support, maintenance and
future development. The current version of the draft MoU is available
from our web, http://lhcb.cern.ch/computing/ under GEANT4 as a word file
for inspection. Please note that this is still a draft.
Apart from some confusing points such as experiments also
participating rather than only institutes and laboratories, the major
problem with MoU is that no clear responsibility for the user support
and maintenance is visible. We are trying to overcome this problem by
organizing a Memorandum to the CERN management from the four LHC
experiments requesting the following: CERN would acknowledge that it is
a part of CERN's contribution to set-up an interface group between the
CERN users and GEANT4 experts, who developed the GEANT4, so that we can
have a clear line of the user support and maintenance. With ALICE and
ATLAS, we are converging. We start to discuss with CMS on Monday and we
hope to come to an agreement.
Once setting up such an interface at CERN is agreed, it may be rather
difficult to avoid signing it soon or later. We have no real choice than
using GEANT4 as a detector simulation tool. We also need to show our
readiness to participate in HEP wide software effort.
I will keep you updated on this problem and we most probably need to
discuss at CB.
yours Tatsuya
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