From peter.willendrup at risoe.dk Sun Jul 2 20:05:26 2006 From: peter.willendrup at risoe.dk (Peter Willendrup) Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 20:05:26 +0200 Subject: [neutron-mc] McStas monthly update 2006-07 Message-ID: <1151863527.13109.41.camel@localhost.localdomain> Hello everyone, To increase the level of McStas project information, the developers have agreed to write an info-mail each month about the current developments. This email is the first such info-mail. Important McStas news are: * mcstas-1.10 will be released during the fall this year, featuring many important improvements, get an overview of these from http://www.mcstas.org/McStas_ACNS2006.pdf . Release highlights are: - New keywords WHEN, JUMP and COPY - First polarisation capable components added - Improvements to sample environment description (more hollow comps) - Optimizing tool built into mcrun, e.g. auto max. guide exit flux - TAS reciprocal space calculator (hkl machine) added - (Even ;) ) Easier win32 install * Peter Willendrup attended ACNS in St. Charles near Chicago during june. The above link will take you to the slides of the talk given. * RSS feed enabled for the website. Front page news items on the webpage can now be read through RSS. Get the RSS xml feed at http://rss.mcstas.org/RSS.xml Cheers, Peter -- Peter Willendrup Ris? National Laboratory From peter.willendrup at risoe.dk Fri Aug 4 10:52:12 2006 From: peter.willendrup at risoe.dk (Peter Willendrup) Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:52:12 +0200 Subject: [neutron-mc] McStas monthly update 2006-august Message-ID: <1154681532.6039.64.camel@localhost.localdomain> Hello everyone, Here is the latest McStas news and a status on work in progress. Preparation for several important meetings and workshops is in progress, including * Peter Willendrup going to Caltech for the DANSE startup meeting mid-august. * Emmanuel Farhi chairing the ESS instrumentation workshop in Rencurel near Grenoble, mid-september ( http://www.ill.fr/Computing/ESS-LP/ ) * Uwe Filges, Geza Zsigmond and others organising the "International Workshop on Applications of Advanced Monte Carlo Simulations in Neutron Scattering" at PSI october 2nd-4th ( http://lns00.psi.ch/mcworkshop/ ) Next release is mcstas-1.10, likely to be released november this year, featuring many important improvements. On the release TODO list we have: 1- Polarisation. Peter Christiansen and Peter Willendrup are currently working on the infrastructure for spin propagation in McStas. However, the new features in mcstas-1.10 in this area are not to be considered the final solution, but will provide a solid starting point. The first simple polarisation-capable components have already been added. Test examples are provided. 2- MPI (for parallel processing) is much more efficient than the use of threading. Emmanuel Farhi currently has a trainee working on the latter to optimise the McStas support for this. For now, we encourage the use of MPI instead. 3- Sample components. Emmanuel farhi is working on benchmarking and cross-comparison between Isotropic_Sqw, PowderN and Single Xtal. In terms of new features, all of these should be able to work in 'concentric' arrangements as of mcstas-1.10. Peter Willendrup will look into this. 4- There is now an MCNP file reader, just as for Tripoli4. (Both are source simulation softwares) Recent extensive simulations of the ILL reactor using both Tripoli4 and MCNP showed very minor differences between the two codes, and the source distributions were analyzed using McStas. 5- A very accurate Detector model will be contributed by T. Vanvuure in mcstas-1.10. Validation using data from the detector group at the ILL is pending. 6- The mcformat (merge and format conversion) tool should be finished to handle and generate McStas scan files for the 1.10 release. Currently it works with merging only and scanning is half done. The current 'beta' version of the code is beeing deployed at SNS (Meili Chen) and Risoe for grid type calculations. (Risoe is considering to set up a grid of some of the idle office PC's runing Win32. - Sort of a Seti at home like solution.) 7- Windows support. Peter Willendrup will put effort in updating the GUI interfaces to run with recent perl versions on Win32. 8- Scilab 4.0. McStas CVS builds now work with Scilab-4.0 in most areas. We will get the rest going before mcstas-1.10. McStas greetings from Risoe and ILL, The McStas team