Release of EGSnrc V3

[Dave Rogers]

Dear EGS Listserver members,

It is with great relief that I announce the availability of the long
overdue Version 3 of the EGSnrc system. It is on-line at
http://www.irs.inms.nrc.ca/inms/irs/EGSnrc/EGSnrc.html

There have been very few changes to the EGSnrc core system. However,
there have been major changes related to the user codes. Aside from
lots of little bug fixes,the statistics package has been completely
rewritten to use a history-by-history technique (discussed in detail in
an upcoming paper by Walters, Kawrakow and Rogers in the Novemeber issue
of Medical Physics). This reduces the uncertainty on the uncertainty by
a large amount - however, the previous uncertainty estimates were
unbiased - ie correct.

The other major advance is a single, very powerful GUI for all of the RZ
user-codes (DOSRZnrc, CAVRZnrc, FLURZnrc and SPRRZnrc). This GUI was
written by Ernesto Mainegra of NRC and uses Qt3, which is available for
free (it is the basis of the KDE desktop). This GUI makes using the
codes much easier.

For those who received a beta version of V3 at the course in April/May,
we strongly encourage you to upgrade to the final version, there have
been many changes.

Please keep us informed of any problems.

Dave Rogers