GEANT4 2016

Introduction

Geant4 is a toolkit for the simulation of the passage of particles through matter. Its areas of application include high energy, nuclear and accelerator physics, as well as studies in medical and space science. For more information refer to the official web page of GEANT4.

Installed Versions

These versions are installed and and currently available ...

... on envirnoment hpc-uniol-env:

• Geant4/9.6.p04 (Patch 04)
• Geant4/10.01.p01 (Patch 01)
• Geant4/10.01.p03 (Patch 03)
• Geant4/10.02.p01 (Patch 01)
• Geant4/10.03.p01 (Patch 01)

... on environment hpc-env/6.4:

• Geant4/10.4.1-intel-2018a-noMT (no multithreading)
• Geant4/10.4.1-intel-2018a
• Geant4/10.05-foss-2017b-noMT (no multithreading)
• Geant4/10.05-foss-2017b

... on environment hpc-env/8.3:

• Geant4/10.6-foss-2019b-noMT
• Geant4/10.6-foss-2019b
• Geant4/10.6.3-foss-2019b-noMT
• Geant4/10.6.3-fosscuda-2019b-noMT
• Geant4/11.0.2-foss-2019b
• Geant4/11.0.2-foss-2019b-noMT
• Geant4/11.0.2-foss-2019b
• Geant4/11.0.2-fosscuda-2022.07-noMT

• • #fosscuda with GPU support (CUDA/cuDNN)

Usually, Geant4 supports multithreading. However, in some cases, the multithreading function can be hindering to your task. This is why there are mostly two versions of Geant4: standard modules and -noMT modules. Should you notice any inconveniences while working with Geant4, consider changing the module to the noMT-version.

The different versions of Geant4 can be found either at the standard environment hpc-uniol-env or at the newer environment hpc-env/8.3.

You can find out the corresponding environments by checking the single versions with spider:

module spider Geant4/10.03.p01

More informations about the version and the patches can be found here.

Using Geant4

If you want to find out more about Geant4 on the HPC cluster, you can use the command

module spider geant4

This will show you basic informations e.g. a short description and the currently installed version. To load the desired version of the module, use e.g. the command

module load Geant4/10.4.1-intel-2018a

Always remember: this command is case sensitive! Also, note that if this command fails, it's very likely that you need to change the environment. See the chapter above.

A guide on how to build and run an example can be found on the official homepage of Geant4: Example

GRAS

The Geant4 Radiation Analysis for Space (GRAS) tool is a Geant4-based application that deals with common analyses types in 3D geometry models. More information and the download of the GRAS package are found on the GRAS web page (login required). In order to use GRAS on the cluster the following steps need to be done:

1. download the installscript (Download)
2. unzip the installscript and the GRAS-package into the same directory, e.g. "gras-installation" in your home directory
3. run the installation script with ./install-gras-03-03.sh

After that, the GRAS package is installed in your home directory (folder name is: gras-03-03) and ready to use.

The package comes with a few examples, to test if everything work you can follow these steps:

 cd $HOME/gras-03-03
 #this adds GRAS to your environment
 . bin/gras-env.sh
 cd examples/magfield/example1/
 module load Python
 #Apply the patch described below
 python launch_example.py
 python plot_results.py

After this you see a number of new files, namely txt-, log-, and png-files (and some more). You need to copy these files to your local machine to view them.

In order to have the example above working you need to change a path in launch_example.py:

 os.chdir("../../../bin/Linux-g++")

should be

 os.chdir("../../../bin")

Note:

If you are using GRAS in any way for your work, please reference the official GRAS paper with the following lines:

GRAS Paper
Official GRAS publication in IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science:
G. Santin, V. Ivanchenko, H. Evans, P. Nieminen, E. Daly, "GRAS: A general-purpose 3-D modular simulation tool for space environment effects analysis", IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 52, Issue 6, 2005, pp 2294 - 2299

GATE

GATE is an advanced opensource software developed by the international OpenGATE collaboration and dedicated to the numerical simulations in medical imaging. It currently supports simulations of Emission Tomography (Positron Emission Tomography - PET and Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography - SPECT), and Computed Tomography.

You can find all of the installed versions of GATE by visiting the software wiki page or by typing
ml spider GATE

After loading your preferred GATE version, you might notice, that there will be loaded numerous modules after this command. This is completely normal as GATE depends on several different modules to work.

g4py

g4py is a set of python modules for using Geant4 and is available on our cluster since the installation of GEANT4/10.05. To start using g4py, you have to change to the environment hpc-env/6.4:

module load hpc-env/6.4
module load g4py

g4py should be the only module you need to load since is comes with numerous of dependencies, like Boost, Python 2.7.14, GEANT4 (noMT), et cetera.

Documentation

The documentation for Geant4 can be found on the official homepage of Geant4: User Documentation