My project for this week is to code review the reader we have for the Genie monte carlo generator. We agreed in Aachen (that’s October 2012) that this was an important step, after which we could get low energy simulation into standard production. With that, we would get all the documentation and portability of the standard tools. Every time I find a new misconfigured cowboy file, I’m thankful that the default for standard production is to Document Absolutely Everything, and it scares me when we get comfortable not doing this.

So. Genie-icetray got stuck in a code review, and I’m spending this week getting it unstuck. Ironically, the student who’s supposed to be working on it doesn’t have time, because he’s too busy generating genie files outside of the standard system. I trust that he’s making good files, but it still makes me nervous. I like systems, I like plans, I like reviews, so I’m doing this review. Alex (simulation organizer) and Markus V (previous reviewer) are both on board, and Claudio is helping orient me around his code.

First step: it’s taken over a full work day to get the needed ports compiled, but they’re all present in the source code.

Next week’s plan is to do a study on the impacts of a simulation approximation. We assume that hadronic cascades have a certain light yield below 10 GeV, and Sebastian has found out that this is badly wrong; he suspects that it accounts for a 50% data/sim mismatch at low energies. We should be able to check this quickly, using some CLSim test scripts: we can turn Geant4 on or off, and see (at the MCHit level) whether the rates are vastly different. But that’s for after the code review. Ooooo so many ideas, so little time.