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Accelerator Modeling and Advanced Computing

Particle accelerators are among the most complex and versatile instruments of scientific exploration. They have enabled remarkable scientific discoveries and important technological advances that span all programs within the DOE Office of Science (DOE/SC). The importance of accelerators to the DOE/SC mission is evident from an examination of the DOE document, "Facilities for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook." Of the 28 facilities originally listed, half involve particle accelerators.

The development of particle accelerators involves R&D in all three aspects of scientific research: theory, experiment, and computation. The importance of accelerators to the Nation and to people’s lives demands that the most advanced scientific computing tools be brought to bear on their development.

The Accelerator Modeling and Advanced Computing (AMAC) effort at LBNL develops and applies state-of-the-art simulation tools for accelerator design, analysis, optimization, and discovery. Our codes are used on projects of the DOE/SC Offices of High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, and Basic Energy Sciences. Examples include simulations in support of the Fermilab Tevatron, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. AMAC codes have been applied to numerous types of rf accelerators including linacs, rings, colliders, ion accelerators, electron accelerators, and photoinjectors. AMAC staff members at LBNL have played major roles in advancing the frontiers of computational accelerator physics, with pioneering accomplishments such as:

  • The development of the widely used IMPACT suite of codes which includes the parallel Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes IMPACT-Z and IMPACT-T.
  • Performance of the first million particle, million turn, strong-strong colliding beam simulation for LHC (using the BeamBeam3D code).
  • Performance of the first billion particle simulation of a linac for an x-ray light source with self-consistent 3D space charge (using the IMPACT-Z code).