Abstract
Virtual Monte Carlo (VMC) [1] provides an abstract interface into Monte Carlo transport codes. A user VMC based application, independent from the specific Monte Carlo codes, can be then run with any of the supported simulation programs. Developed by the ALICE Offline Project and further included in ROOT [2], the interface and implementations have reached stability during the last decade and have become a foundation for other detector simulation frameworks, the FAIR facility experiments framework being among the first and largest.Geant4 VMC [3], which provides the implementation of the VMC interface for Geant4 [4], is in continuous maintenance and development, driven by the evolution of Geant4 on one side and requirements from users on the other side. Besides the implementation of the VMC interface, Geant4 VMC also provides a set of examples that demonstrate the use of VMC to new users and also serve for testing purposes. Since major release 2.0, it includes the G4Root navigator package, which implements an interface that allows one to run a Geant4 simulation using a ROOT geometry.The release of Geant4 version 10.00 with the integration of multithreading processing has triggered the development of the next major version of Geant4 VMC (version 3.0), which was released in November 2014. A beta version, available for user testing since March, has helped its consolidation and improvement. We will review the new capabilities introduced in this major version, in particular the integration of multithreading into the VMC design, its impact on the Geant4 VMC and G4Root packages, and the introduction of a new package, MTRoot, providing utility functions for ROOT parallel output in independent files with necessary additions for thread-safety. Migration of user applications to multithreading that preserves the ease of use of VMC will be also discussed. We will also report on the introduction of a new CMake [5] based build system, the migration to ROOT major release 6 and the improvement of the testing suites.
Highlights
Geant4 Virtual Monte Carlo (VMC) [3] has been previously described in [6], [7] and in the context of ALICE in [8]
The major version 1.0 included geometry convertors which allowed to use geometry defined with new ROOT geometrical modeller, TGeo [11], in a VMC application
G4Root was moved in Geant4 VMC from ROOT in order to group together Geant4 related packages based on ROOT and to facilitate their building for the user
Summary
Geant4 VMC [3] has been previously described in [6], [7] and in the context of ALICE in [8]. Major version: the integration of multithreading into the VMC design, the introduction of a new CMake based build system, the migration to ROOT major release 6 and the other improvements. The first version of the VMC interface was included in ROOT 3.03/05 in October 2002.
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