WCSim is a very flexible Geant4-based program for developing and simulating large water Cherenkov detectors.

As of August 2014 WCSim has been moved to GitHub. It can be found here

WCSim has very few external dependencies. It relies on only ROOT and Geant4.

There is a mailing list which will send you GitHub push/checkin notifications here

You can follow issues/requests etc by watching the GitHub respository.

WCSim uses GitHub Actions CI to perform build and physics tests for each pull request and commit. The scripts it runs can be found in this separate github repository

Validation results can be found here

Tutorials and information about the branches and WCSim development model can be found on the wiki

More detailed information about the simulation is available in doc/DetectorDocumentation.pdf

Additionally, doxygen documentation is available here. Note that most of the code has no doxygen comments, but all output class member variables are documented. See the WCSimRoot* classes

doxygen documentation can be built locally by running

cd $WCSIM_SOURCE_DIR/ && doxygen WCSim_doxygen_config

For admin: A more featured doxygen build can be performed & pushed using an alternative doxygen config file (requires dot from graphviz)

git clone -b gh-pages --single-branch [email protected]:WCSim/WCSim.git WCSim-dox
cd WCSim-dox
./get_dox.sh

You can also make this featured version locally by

cd $WCSIM_SOURCE_DIR
git clone -b gh-pages --single-branch [email protected]:WCSim/WCSim.git WCSim-dox
doxygen WCSim-dox/WCSim_doxygen_config

The automated building testing is currently performed inside the hk-software docker container with the prerequisites:

• Geant4 10.3.3 (installed via CMake)
  • All of the G4 data files are also required to be installed, include hadron xsec, etc.
• ROOT 6.26/04 (installed via CMake)
• HepMC3 3.2.6
• gcc 8.5.0
• CMake 3.20.2

And as such this is the most supported version of the software (it is guaranteed to work)

Other versions of prerequisite software can be tried, but aren't guaranteed to work.

• Geant
  • If using a newer version of Geant, it is your responsiblity to assess whether Geant physics changes are significant, relative to the officially supported 4.10.3.3
• ROOT
  • ROOT5 (e.g. v5r34p36 or v5r34p38, or potentially any v5r34) can potentially be made to work. You may need to modify $WCSIM_BUILD_DIR/src/cmake_install.cmake to take account of ROOT5 not producing .pcm files
  • ROOT6 has been tested on an older version than above (6.20/04)
• HepMC3
  • HepMC3 version 3.2.6 is supported and any minor versions below/above this should also work.
  • It is possible that older versions (<=3.1.x) will also work, though this is not guaranteed.
• CMake 3.1 and above are required by CMakeLists.txt, but not all old versions have been tested
• The compiler should support -std=c++11 (or -std=c++0x) e.g. gcc 4.8.5
  • The WCSim CMake step should set your C++ standard to be the same as what was used by the installation of ROOT you are building against

CMake is cross-platform software for managing the build process in a compiler-independent way. It is required to build ROOT and Geant4 also through CMake. Using cmake, builds and source code need to well separated and make it easier to build many versions of the same software.

A recommended way to set up the directory structure in your own preferred WCSIM_HOME:

• ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim : contains the src dir, typically the cloned or unzipped code from GitHub
• ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim_build : contains directories for each build, eg. for each branch you want to test or for different releases, comparing debugged versions, etc. Each subdirectory like WCSim_dev or WCSim_v1.2 would contain the intermediate files produced during compilation and not the finale ones

To compile you need to have CMakeLists.txt in the WCSim source dir.

• mkdir -p ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim_build/mydir ; cd ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim_build/mydir
• Set up the dependencies

  source /path/to/thisroot.sh
  source /path/to/geant4.sh

• cmake3 ../../WCSim : this executes the commands in CMakeLists.txt and generates the Makefiles for both the ROOT library as the main executable.
  • For some OS, cmake3 is just cmake
• make clean : if necessary
• make -j\nproc` install` : will
  • first compile libWCSimRoot.so which you need for using the ROOT Dict from WCSim (e.g. to read the output files)
  • compile WCSim (libWCSimCore.so and the executable WCSim)
  • install the software in the build directory (copies things into bin/, include/, etc.)
• source bin/this_wcsim.sh : will setup the environment variables such that you can run WCSim

To recompile:

• Typically just make install will be enough and also redo the cmake phase if something changed.
• Sometimes you need to make clean first.
• When there are problems, try removing CMakeCache.txt, and redo the cmake.

Useful cmake commands:

• make edit_cache : customize the build.
• make rebuild_cache : redo the cmake phase.

• -DWCSim_Geometry_Overlaps_CHECK=<ON|OFF> If ON, turns on geometry overlap checking when running the code (slow, but important when setting new detector geometry options). Default: OFF
• -DWCSim_DEBUG_COMPILE_FLAG=<ON|OFF> If ON, turns on the gcc debug compiler flag -g. Default: OFF
• -DWCSIM_SAVE_PHOTON_HISTORY_FLAG=<ON|OFF> If ON, turns on photon scattering/reflection history saving. The data class WCSimRootCherenkovHitHistory is used in a similar way as WCSimRootCherenkovHitTime. Default: OFF
• -DWCSim_WCSimRoot_only=<ON|OFF> If ON, only builds the WCSimRoot library (ignoring the WCSimCore one). This is useful if one wants only to read the WCSim output files (for e.g. reconstruction) and not running any simulation. Default: OFF

A script allowing to build WCSim with CMake on sukap is available:

cd $WCSIM_SOURCE_DIR
./setup/env_sukap.sh
./make.sh

Note that ./make.sh should also work on other systems.

This script will read the current WCSim directory name and create a directory to hold the different cmake builds. For example, in case your current WCSim directory name is 'WCSim', it will create a '../WCSim-build' directory. It will also create a ../WCSim-install directory.

It will then create a directory for your current branch which will have the name of the current branch. For example, in case your current branch name is hybridPMT, you will have:

WCSim/
WCSim-build/
WCSim-build/hybridPMT/
WCSim-install/
WCSim-install/hybridPMT/

Note that by default, just make install is run. You can run make clean before make install by running ./make.sh clean

export WCSIM_BUILD_DIR=/path/to/WCSim/
cd $WCSIM_BUILD_DIR
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/WCSim/WCSim.git -b makefile --single-branch makefiledir
cp makefiledir/GNUmakefile .
make clean_wcsim
make rootcint
make

Docker allows you to use WCSim without compiling in an OS independant way. The Docker images are hosted on DockerHub and can be used by following the steps below.

1. Install Docker cross platform instructions can be found at https://www.docker.com/
2. Get the latest HK container image docker pull ghcr.io/hyperk/hk-software:main
3. Run an instance of the container which will have WCSim and all dependencies installed docker run --name=WCSim -it ghcr.io/hyperk/hk-software:main

• Note: only run once or you will make multiple contianers
• To save data from inside your docker image mount a local folder in the docker image at runtime and then anything placed in that directory will be available in that folder after exit. To do that run the following docker run --name=WCSim -it -v local_folder_path:docker_mount_path ghcr.io/hyperk/hk-software:main

4. The WCSim version in the container will probably be out of date. Let's update it

cd $WCSIM_SOURCE_DIR
git pull origin develop
cd ../build-Linux_x86_64-gcc_8-python_3.8.13
make -j`nproc` install

5. Run WCSim
6. To exit the docker image exit

Note: You only need to use the docker run command once to create the container. Once created you changes are saved in that container instance and you can start the container at any time with docker start -i WCSim

Extra docker commands:

1. See all images docker images
2. Delete an image docker rmi imageID
3. See all containers docker ps -a
4. Delete a container docker rm ContainerID

Singularity is a similar container tool with different philosophies. The most important being that you can't run as root. This means that it may be installed and available to use on your local cluster.

You should be able to run the docker container with singularity without any problems. Just to note that $WCSIM_SOURCE_DIR and $WCSIM_BUILD_DIR will be read-only, therefore you should clone, build, and run a new version of WCSim elsewhere (if you forget you'll see a nasty seg fault when running WCSim - this is just because of the read-only directory).

To test that WCSim is working (however you installed it), try running the test macro WCSim.mac, which runs 10 electrons with 5 MeV of energy in the Super-Kamiokande detector (it should take less than a minute to run).

cd $WCSIM_BUILD_DIR
WCSim WCSim.mac macros/tuning_parameters.mac

WCSim.mac is well commented. Take a look inside (and also at other .mac files in /macros/) for the various options you can use to run WCSim

There are a few example scripts inside sample-root-scripts/

• sample_readfile.C is a general script that allows you to see (most) event-level variables
• For the hybrid geometry, see AnalyzeWSHierarchy.c
  • Compile it using the Makefile in sample-root-scripts/ (i.e. run make from that folder)
  • Execute it using Analyzer.sh in sample-root-scripts/ (i.e. run ./Analyzer.sh from that folder)
• For info about the other scripts, see the README inside sample-root-scripts/

• gamma = green
• neutrino = yellow
• electron = blue
• positron = red
• muon = white
• muon+ = silver
• proton = magenta
• neutron = cyan

WCSim development is supported by the United States National Science Foundation.