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For the past 10+ years SLAC has been the lead laboratory in the US for linear collider detector R&D computing effort. We have developed flexible tools to allow simulation and reconstruction of detectors in sufficient detail to allow realistic comparison of the capabilities of detector technologies and associated reconstruction algorithms. An emphasis of the group has been on developing infrastructure to allow physicists from universities and other labs to rapidly get started and contribute to detector R&D.
The SLAC group has taken a leading role in the creation and support of standards to ensure a large degree of interoperability with other detector R&D efforts in Europe and Asia. One component of this approach is the LCIO libraries which provide a fully documented standard format for reading and writing events at the generator level, full simulation level and reconstruction and analysis level. The LCIO libraries support C++, Fortran and Java and have been adopted by all most linear collider detector studies worldwide. The interoperability afforded by the LCIO libraries has been a major contributor to the successful completion of the recent LOI effort in the linear collider community.
There are significant differences in the design of such tools for detector R&D compared to typical experiment specific simulation and reconstruction code.
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The major tools created to meet these design goals are the SLIC Geant4 based simulation program the Java based org.lcsim reconstruction and analysis tools suite, including the WIRED event display and JAS3 data analysis system.
SLIC is a C++ program based on Geant4 which supports reading standard event generator level input (stdhep) and generates LCIO output files. Rather than having detector geometry built-in to the code, SLIC reads the detector geomtry geometry at runtime from an XML detector description. The detector description is based on the standard GDML geometry format developed at CERN, but extended to allow detector response parameterizations to also be specified in the same XML file.
The org.lcsim reconstruction and analysis suite is written in Java and includes the following major components:
- Standard geometry system
- Full support for LCIO standards
- Fast "parameterized" monte-carlo
- Full reconstruction infrastructure into which
, including the WIRED event display and JAS3 data analysis system
Both org.lcsim and SLIC work with a common high level "compact detector description" which makes it easy to adjust detector parameters and ensure consistency between the simulated and reconstructed data.
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In addition to direct support of these tools the SLAC group has:
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- Made available a large collection of standard simulation samples for a variety of event types and standard detector and accelerator configurations.
- Hosted infrastructure shared with related efforts worldwide the including the
- lcsim.org web site,
- ILC and SiD related content on the confluence wiki(confluence.slac.stanford.edu) including many detailed tutorials and reference documentation.
- Discussion forums at forum.linearcollider.org. These are the primary means of providing support to end users who have questions or problems using the software, as well as for discussion between software developers world-wide.
- CVS repository at cvs.freehep.org and automated continuous build system (hudson). This repository is used to host the LCIO libraries, the core SLIC and org.lcsim software and many user contributed analysis algorithms and tools.
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