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@willend willend released this 13 Dec 08:31
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December 12th, 2022: McStas 2.7.2 and McStas 3.2 released

Dear all, A new PAIR of releases of McStas:

  • McStas "classic" v. 2.7.2
  • McStas "next-generation", v. 3.2
are both built and ready for download!

Download and installation instructions are available via our GitHub INSTALL-doc pages - and available below as attachments for the most usual platforms.

Selected highligts from the releases are listed below. The full list of changes for both releases is also available in CHANGES_McStas.

Please start your migration to 3.x:

- If you are still in trouble, please write us a GitHub issue or an email to [email protected]

Fixes of issues from last releases:
A good number of issues from the earlier 2.7.1 and 3.1 releases were addressed, see the relevant GitHub issues for details:
Full 2.7.1 issue list
Full 3.1 issue list

Release highligts
(!!3.2 only denotes features or improvements that are 3.2 specific!!)

  • Documentation & guides:
    • 3.2 only: All 3.2 component and instrument headers have been given an overhaul and should render correctly in mcdoc / your browser.
    • The component pages now include an extra column in the parameter-table. When filling in this column with wanted values, plus filling the entry-boxes for AT, ROTATED and instance name, pressing "Generate" will put a code-snipet for your component instance directly on your computer clipboard, for easy transfer to the mcgui editor or any other editor of choice!
    • mcdoc has been made "less picky" wrt. component and instrument structure for a more robust experience.
    • mcgui has a new "Docs" button for easier access to the generated mcdoc pages (that give easy access to components, instruments, manuals, datafiles and more.
  • Interoperability with other codes:
    • We have worked on the interfaces with MCPL (v. 1.6.1 included) and NCrystal (v. 3.5.1 included) and a mechanism was developed to automatically detect their location using the mcpl-config and ncrystal-config utils. In practice this happens prior/during to the code-generation step, see below under mcrun. Thanks to Thomas Kittelmann (ESS) for your help in this area.
  • Tools:
    • mcrun has a new solution to support 3 new keywords CMD(), ENV() and GETPATH() through the DEPENDENCY line as collected by the code-generator. (see CHANGES doc for more details)
    • As mentioned above, mcdoc has been made "less picky" wrt. component and instrument structure and enriched with JavaScript for easy transfer of information to you editor.
    • mcplot(-pyqtgraph) has received a nice update with an infobar at the bottom of the window. The infobar is updated with coordinates of the cursor on the active plot, meaning that you can easily determine the coordinates of e.g. a peak. The code has also received a number of bugfixes relating to colorbars, the order of monitor output in overviews etc. Thanks to Tobias Weber (ILL) for your work on mcplot.
    • 3.2 only: The new mcdisplay-cad variant has come along, and is currently included in the form of a technology-preview. The code uses the Python module cadquery (https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery) and is able to write e.g. STEP or STL output. For now, resolving the required dependencies is left to the user, but we foresee that this tool will mature over the coming releases. Thanks to Greg Tyler (ESS) for contributing this tool.
  • Components and Instruments:
    • The Union framework is now considered a fully "official" part of McStas and is hence now found in the $MCSTAS/union folder. In McStas 3.2 Union_master is a still a NOACC component when running on GPU (i.e. performs its calculations on CPU in FUNNEL mode). We expect Union_master to receive full GPU suport within 2023. The NCrystal_process.comp is back in Union on 3.2 - will work only in a NOACC/CPU COMPONENT setting.
    • By popular demand, the ConicTracer code for simulating Wolter optics from Boris Khaykovich et. al. (MIT) has been included. The main "library" code is conic.h found in $MCSTAS/share and is used from 3 different example Wolter optic components: Conics_EH.comp, Conics_PH.comp, Conics_PP.comp. The illustrate how to mplement Elliptic-Hyperbolic, Parabolic-Hyperbolic and Parabolic-Parabolic Wolter mirrors, and two of these are used in the Test_Conics_pairs.instr instrument.
    • 3.2 only: Most of the standard monitors will now fill in their own "instance name" as filename in case a filename was not defined. A small but very useful convenience.
    • Source_div_quasi.comp allows to sample source phase-space using Halton-sequences, which proves to be a very effective way to ensure an evenly distributed phase space region of interest, e.g. for imaging/SANS settings where a very low-divergent beam is relevant. This contribution is from Mads Carlsen and Erik B. Knudsen (DTU) and was originally developed for McXtrace.
    • PSD_Pol_monitor.comp measures (local) polarisation over the (x,y) cross-section of a beam. Contributed by Alexander Backs (LU/ESS).
    • 3.2 only: Single_crystal_inelastic.comp (NOACC), Single_magnetic_crystal.comp (NOACC), SANS_benchmark2.comp and Guide_multichannel are now all available in the McStas 3 series. Also, the Fermi_chop2a.comp and Vertical_T0a.comp chopppers from Garrett Granroth (SNS) have received a GPU-oriented update.
  • Core and libs:
    • 3.2 only: Previously, any component present in a McStas instrument would trigger the transformation of every neutron to its local coordinate system, even in the case of an Arm() (empty TRACE) without an EXTEND block. We now instead detect components with an empty TRACE that have no EXTEND block and are able to completely skip these in the calculation. This results in a speedup in case of instruments with many "empty" components, such as big Union assemblies. Thanks to Mads Bertelsen (ESS) for investigating the problem and finding a good solution.
    • 3.2 only: A new syntax called SHELL has been added to the grammar, allowing users to run a system command prior to code-generation. This may for instance be used to generate an instrument-snippet that you may %include in the instrument (think for-loops of an assembly of identical components). One could also imagine compilation of a needed library, wget of a data file etc. The synax is SHELL "command-to-execute" and it should be placed directly after a DEPENDENCY line within an instrument or component. We expect that applications and examples will come in the next couple of releases.
    • 3.2 only: Components may from McStas 3.2 request USERVARS that become part of the particle struct. (For the time being only in the form of basic C types like double, int etc. and corresponding arrays / pointers.) This will mean that e.g. the optimisations in Single_crystal and PowderN in SPLIT scenarios can be introduced also in GPU settings. The first component to make use of this mechanism is Res_monitor.comp as used in Test_TasReso.instr.
    • The (r-)interoff-lib.c family of codes have received multiple updates, thanks to McStas users Kyle Grammer (ORNL) and Gaetano Mangiapia (HZH):
      • The intersection routines now work correctly with gravity
      • The r-interoff-lib (and the related Guide_anyshape_r component) now support specifying a "full" reflectivity curve pr. OFF face, columns of m, alpha and W values should be added in this order to the OFF face.
    • A flaw was spotted in our NeXus implementation in the case of event lists: A small chunk-size of (1,6) was used, leading to slow I/O and lots of size-overhead. Thanks to Simon Heybrock (ESS) for spotting this!
    • A correction to ref-lib.c was recieved from Gaetano Mangiapia (HZH), allowing closer correspondance between simulated and measured mirror-reflectivities.

Platforms:
We still support 64bit Windows 10/11 on Intel, all recent 64bit macOS including 11.x - 13.x Monterey on both Intel and Apple Silicon/M1 processors. Debian/Ubuntu-based distros on Intel and Arm, our RPM-based distro is Fedora on Intel. (Official support for CentOS has been dropped, but you should be able to "roll your own" from the src packages.)

Our Docker and binder containers will be updated within the following weeks.

We hope you will enjoy these new releases!!!

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