User:Vlachoudis/sandbox

About
/fleə(r)/ n [U,C] natural or instinctive ability to do something well, to select or recognize what is best, more useful, etc.

flair is an advanced user friendly interface for several Monte Carlo codes. Originally it was developed for FLUKA, where its unique features strongly contributed to the success of both codes FLUKA and flair. From version 3 the interface was separated from the functionality permitting an easy integration of other simulation packages.

The current line of development is to make flair a unique tool for performing calculations with the same input using FLUKA, Geant4, PENELOPE, and other simulations engines.

Presently is fully supporting the CERN FLUKA version and there is ongoing work to support: PENELOPE, Moira a Geant4 based application, permitting the user to run with Geant4 FLUKA equivalent inputs with the same geometry, materials, scoring,... Other codes like MCNP, PHITS could be added in the future.

Version 3 *most* important changes:
http://cern.ch/flair
 * WEBSITE Change, From December 1st 2019 the official web site of flair is


 * Support to the www.fluka.org is discontinued.


 * Flair v3 is being completely restructured and based on python v3. Previous versions of flair (until v2.5) were based on Python v2. On January 1 2020, python v2 will no longer be supported by its creators and all major Linux distributions are already moving away from it.


 * From v3 the master input file for flair is the ".flair" project file (no longer the ".inp"). i.e. the whole FLUKA input file is stored in the ".flair" file in an text human readable way.


 * Input Editor is now based on a Text widget and no longer on the Canvas. This gives more flexibility to operate as a text-editor, with considerable improvement in performance. (i.e. a huge input file of 25000+ cards was taking almost 20s in the past to be displayed in the input editor, now on the same computer it takes less than 3s.)


 * The geometry engine is restructured to allow its use as a geometry navigator for simulation programs, allowing the easy integration of the present FLUKA input geometries in Geant4.


 * There are numerous improvements in the geometry engine for a better user experience, i.e. more logical error checks, 3D plots are enhanced with ambient occlusion for photo-realistic shadows, and faster adaptive antialiasing and edge detection.


 * For a complete log of the new flair v3 features please look at the associated release notes.