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Distribution Area for egs4unix_3.0,
Version 3.0 of the Unix system for EGS4
Ionizing Radiation Standards Group
National Research Council of Canada

Note that a new, highly improved version of EGS4 is available. It is called EGSnrc and is available here.

The complete EGSnrc manual (PIRS-701) is available on-line and the section describing the improvements over EGS4 is available here.

Two papers were published in Medical Physics, March 2000 which describe much of the improved physics. These and other related works are available on-line.

EGS4 and licenses

There have been some questions raised about the EGS4 license conditions. These are very similar to those covered in the EGSnrc license (see above site). We will be developing a formal license statement. In the meantime, the e-mail on the EGS listserver of Sept 14, 2000 tries to address some of the issues.

What is EGS4?

EGS4 is a Monte Carlo code for doing simulations of the transport of electrons and photons in arbitrary geometries. It was originally developed at SLAC for high energy physics applications and has been extended with the help of NRC and KEK to apply for lower energy applications. To obtain a copy of the 400 page manual (``The EGS4 Code System'' by W. R. Nelson and H. Hirayama and D.W.O. Rogers, SLAC-265, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, 1985), email W. Ralph Nelson. For an extensive bibliography of papers related to the use of EGS4, see the ``NRC Bibliography of EGS Related Papers''. There is also an EGS home page and the related BEAM home page about modelling radiotherapy accelerators. At NRC there are also a large number of papers available both directly on-line or as postscript files.

The distribution

This is version 3 of the NRCC Unix distribution related to EGS. There have been many improvements and changes which are summarized in CHANGES_from_2.0 , mostly related to portability of the code to different Unix flavours (SGI, SUN, DEC OSF, HP, Linux, RS6000 have been tested), plus many small changes to the code (in particular the bug in the Moller sampling routine is fixed), the mortran compiler now uses a larger buffer (300K) and PEGS4 now works on SGI's, although we don't know how it got fixed!. The major NRC user code DOSRZ has seen extensive upgrades, such as KERMA and scattered photon scoring options plus various new source routines. We have also added the user code FLURZ to the distribution (this has the same characteristics as DOSRZ but it scores fluence in cylindrical geometries rather than dose). Unfortunately, FLURZ uses the variable length tab option for output and this doesn't work for all compilers- in particular the g77 linux compiler). The EGS_Windows package has also been extensively upgraded by Bill Haneman, but it still only works for SGI machines.

README.general.3.0 describes more details about this distribution
Announce.Release is a copy of the announcement of the release of this version, with acknowledgements of help received about this distribution from many people.

EGS_Windows

EGS_Windows is a code for displaying EGS simulations in 3-D. In fall 1999 a new version of EGS_Windows became available which works on any X-windows based machine, in particular Linux based machines. It is distributed from its own site.

Known Bugs

CHANGES_from_3.0 is a list of all bugs reported and changes made in the EGS4 system at NRC since the release of 3.0. You may need some of these to make the distribution work.

Files to download

To download one of these files, using Netscape(2.0 or greater, but not from a PC running DOS/Windows because the transfer of the file doesn't work!), point to the file you want, push the right mouse button and ``Save link as...'' to the file you want on your local area.

Using Mosaic, under the options menu, select the ``Load to local disk'' option and then click on the file(s) you want.

The uncompressed tar file is 10 Mbytes and more space is needed for installation and testing (75 Mbytes for 2 supplied scripts). You only need one tar file, the shorter assuming you have gzip installed.

egs4unix_3.0.tar.gz 2,412,983 bytes

egs4unix_3.0.tar.Z 2,882,025 bytes

The following 2 files are the NRC system updated to May 1998 for use at the 1998 EGS4 course. See the CHANGES_from_3.0 file for list of changes. Note these file DO NOT include PRESTA-II. We are working on it. If you already have EGS4 running, you probably don't need to download this update. If you are a new user, you might as well pick up the latest although it has not been carefully checked on anything other than SGI and Linux.
If you want to use DOSRZ with the new distribution, you MUST also download the new_dosrz_distn.tar files below since the 3.2 distribution mistakenly did not include all new files. 3.2 does not include the old DOSRZ.
egs4unix_3.2.tar.gz 2,496,864 bytes

egs4unix_3.2.tar.Z 2,974,726 bytes

INSTALL_EGS Very useful script B for installing EGS4. Remember to: chmod +x INSTALL_EGS.

CHANGES_from_2.0 A file with changes made to EGS4 system since distribution of version 2.0. Look here for errors found and corrected.

If you have trouble downloading the tar files using your browser, it is possible to pick them up using an ftp site, but note you still need the INSTALL_EGS etc from this area. (If you have trouble accessing this ftp site, please inform the webmaster)

NEW DOSRZ

We have completely reworked the user-code DOSRZ to have a much friendlier input routine and more robust output routines. The output is now fully integrated with the xmgr plotting package. You can download just this package to work with versions 3.2 or 3.0. new_dosrz_distn.tar.Z 164,466 bytes

new_dosrz_distn.tar.gz 108,637 bytes

KEK -extensions

These extensions have not been integrated into the standard NRCC system, but are clearly of interest and should be easy to make work. These extensions include bound Compton effects, linearly polarized photon scattering and Implementation of L-Shell Photoelectron and L X-rays for elements.
Other extensions are photon cross section data based on PHOTX, revision of Sternheimer density effect coefficient, and EGS4 shower display system on PC. For information about them, visit EGS4 home page at KEK or contact Hideo Hirayama and Yoshihito Namito .

Register Please

We would appreciate having you register as a user if you download the files. Please send an e-mail message to egs4 and include your own e-mail address, your institution and as much info as you care to share about your application. Note however that this is not a ``persons'' account, and we are only using this account to keep a record of the users and the mail may not be read often. We may use the names to send out information about updates etc. You are also asked to send the same information to W. Ralph Nelson. For further information, see the contacts below.

EGS4 listserver

There is an EGS4 discussion group maintained at Stanford. This is the method we will use to announce updates etc. To send e-mail to the entire list use:
egs4-l@mailbox.slac.stanford.edu


To add or delete yourself, send an e-mail to:
listserv@mailbox.slac.stanford.edu

and in the body of the mail, issue these commands (only)
SUBscribe EGS4-L your_name           This will add you to list

UNSubscribe EGS4-L This will get you off the list
WHO EGS4-L Gets list of subscribers
END To prevent signatures from messing up
For further information see details on the EGS home page.


Further information in general about the distribution and use of EGS4 on unix systems, e-mail:

Dave Rogers


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