September 24th, 2008: Ven ESS workshop website
A website has been set up for the forthcoming workshop on instrumentation for the ESS. The workshop is a continuation of the work started at the Rencurel ESS workshop and will take place at the island of Ven.
September 24th, 2008: McStas 1.12 Windows, bug and fix
McStas user Tom Chen has recently made the McStas team aware of a bug preventing him to do optimization from mcgui on Windows, which always selected --ncount=1e6. Further testing showed that both scans and --optim runs using both mcgui and mcrun were affected.
Only Windows installations of McStas 1.12 are affected.
To remedy the problem, please replace your c:\McStas\bin\mcrun.pl with this version.
An updated version of McStas 1.12 with this and other fixes will be made available within a few weeks.
September 3rd, 2008: Workshop on ESS instruments
The Rencurel ESS workshop was a great succes, and a similar workshop has now been arranged for 2008.
This years workshop will take place at the island of Ven in the Øresund strait between Sweden and Denmark, October 27th-31st. No official workshop webpage is available yet, a link will be posted here when this changes.
The workshop is arranged and sponsored by the ESS Lund secretariat and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
Risø DTU is in charge of the computing infrastructure and has partnered with IBM Denmark who have kindly made computer hardware available to the workshop.
 | - official computing sponsor of the Ven ESS workshop 2008 |
September 2nd, 2008: Looking forward at McStas 2.0
During a meeting this summer, the developer team agreed that time has come to release a new major release of McStas, leaving the 1.x series. As explained in the manual, a change in the major release number should only occur in case of loss of backward compatibility. The main areas where this will happen is:
- Component parameter naming convention. We have defined a common nomemclature for similar components, easing the process of interchanging components.
- Polarisation. We are making serious progress in polarisation support, meaing that we will merge the existing STATE PARAMETERS (x,y,z,vx,vy,vz,t,s1,s2,p) and POLARISATION PARAMETERS (sx, sy, sz) to a new STATE PARAMETERS (x,y,z,vx,vy,vz,t,sx,sy,sz,p)
Since we have now defined that the next version will break (some) backward compatibilty, this list might extend slightly.
McStas 1.12 will remain supported for one year after release of McStas 2.0, allowing users a calm transition period.
Possibly a bugfix release of McStas 1.12 will appear during fall/winter of 2008.
McStas 2.0 is planned for spring 2009
June 12th, 2008: New email adresses for support issues
The support email adresses have today been moved to the mcstas.org domain:
For a certain period of time the old email adresses will still work, but please update your address books.
May 11th, 2008: McStas 1.12 / Ubuntu 8.04 DVD availble
A new live DVD / combined install medium for McStas 1.12 and Ubuntu 8.04 has been compiled. It is of size approximately 1 Gb and is available from our Ubuntu download page. If you are attending the ACNS next week, you can also get a copy there.
May 8th, 2008: McStas 1.12 talk / demo at ACNS
Emmanuel Farhi and Peter Willendrup will attend the ACNS 2008 conference from monday. Emmanuel is giving the talk Virtual Neutron Scattering Experiments on the TeraGrid during the monday A symposium on instrumentation and data analysis, and there will be a number of Monte-Carlo related posters in the monday PA1 poster session, including a McStas 1.12 poster. If you are also an attendee of the ACNS conference please come and see us for software demos!
May 8th, 2008: McStas 1.12 is now ready
A new release of McStas is finally ready! Pick it up from the download page. The changes since last stable release (1.11)
are available here, including a new %include INSTR keyword for inclusion of instruments in instruments, many useful new features
in mcgui, support for recent releases of Windows and Mac OS, new components, new example instruments and many other useful new things.