Dear MC activists, dear friends, on Thursday 20 Dec we had the 1st meeting of the MC group in the analysis center, and discussed to following issues: - planing and duties of the MC group Monte Carlo programs are hadron level event generators, but also NLO parton level calculations. The idea is to be involved in both areas. - MC maintenance and validation We agreed, that we will have a GENSER mirror at DESY (as agreed with the GENSER people at CERN) and that we will contribute to the further maintenance and development. As a first step, we will provide a HEPMC interface to the MC generators, which do not have it, and use this then to fill root histos for generator validation. At this step, we only access infos from HEPMC (there is no jet reconstruction etc....) This interface will be then used in the MC school at DESY in spring 2008. - Tuning of MCs We agreed, that for detailed tuning we will use and support RIVET, which allows using jet algos etc, and a detailed comparison with already published data from Tevatron, LEP and HERA. We will also support the moving of the HZTOOL subroutines to the RIVET environment. - activities in MC development It was clear, that the main area of Monte Carlo development will be for CASCADE, because we have already quite some activities at DESY and we think, it is very important to have at least one multi-purpose event generator which follows an alternative scheme. The activities in this area go from generator development to determination of unintegrated PDFs, form HERA but also from Tevatron. Another area, where we will contribute is the area of PDF determination in general, but especially also the PDF4MC field. It was discussed, that the PDF area will be strongly connected to the MC activities, since PDFs are important for the MC event generators as well as for the MC NLO parton level calculations. - planing of the MC school in March 2008 We discussed briefly the planning for the MC school in spring at DESY. It was mentioned, that some people will not be able to participate, if the school is in the week before easter (17-19.March, as announced during the kickoff workshop). However, there was no strong argument to move the school, as other people might not be able to attend if it is later. - AOB After the MC group meeting was a short meeting for the analysis center. The idea came up, to link also the statistics tools to the determination of PDFs and the uncertainty treatment. This would then fit well into activities for PDF4LHC and PDF4MC. The next meeting of the MC group will be in early January. There we should then discuss, how the different duties are distributed, and who will/can do what . This is all now for 2007.... I wish you all very nice and relaxing Christmas holidays and a happy, interesting and successful 2008 Cheers Hannes *********************************************************************** Hannes Jung Email: Hannes.Jung@desy.de mobile :+49 160 96616610 http://www.desy.de/~jung Tel: +49 (0) 40 8998 3741 Fax: +49 (0) 40 8998 3093 DESY, FH1, Bldg. 1b, 331, Notkestr.85, 22603 Hamburg, FRG ***********************************************************************