[neutron-mc] McStas monthly update 2006-august

[Peter Willendrup]

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