Hadronic Shower Code Inter-Comparison and Verification

To evaluate the quality of general purpose particle interaction and transport codes widely used in the high-energy physics community, express benchmarking is conducted. Seven tasks, important for high-energy physics applications, are chosen. For this first shot, they are limited to particle production on thin and thick targets and energy deposition in targets and calorimetric setups. Five code groups were asked to perform calculations in the identical conditions and provide results to the authors of this report. Summary of the code inter-comparison and verification against available experimental data is presented in this paper. Agreement is quite reasonable in many cases, but quite serious problems were revealed in the others.