Minutes of MC group meeting 26 June 2008

* Announcements
Deadline for MC position passed, we have 18 very good applications. Commission: I. Brock, H.Jung, J.Katzy, J. Mnich, K.Moenig, M. Kraemer, T. Sjoestrand,  D. Zeppenfeld.   Commission has selected 3 candidates, interviews will be on 17.July with talks which are open to analysis center members.

MCnet studentships were announced. It was suggested, that we also offer studentships for PhD students to come to the AnaCenter to work for a dedicated period on a special subject. This is already intended for the AnaCenter, but announcing studentship could encourage people to come.

* GENSER status report (S. Levonian)
Genser mirror is updated regularly, including a new release of Sherpa. LHApdf 5.4.0 is released, lhapdf 5.4.0 has been re-installed using g77 rather than gfortran (by changing the order in "ac_prog" lists in the configure file). After that mcatnlo 3.31 was also re-installed using lhapdf 5.4.0 without problems.

Next steps would be validation and tuning.

* MCtester: (Zhonghua Qin)
first tests of tau decays with MCtester were presented comparing PYTHIA and HERWIG with and without TAUOLA interface. Seems that Herwig fortran gives lower results than others... has to be checked again and then communicated with authors. MCtester can be used also for other resonances, but we need to gain experience how to actually do it.

* Grid computing (E. Wuensch)
A nice introduction and explanation of the ideas of grid computing was given. This offers good possibility for the PDF4MC fits. The details need to be investigated, We should also investigate how to use the NAF.


next meeting will be on: 10 July 2008