High-Performance Computing Modeling Advances Accelerator Science for High-Energy Physics

The development and optimization of particle accelerators are essential for advancing our understanding of the properties of matter, energy, space, and time. Particle accelerators are complex devices whose behavior involves many physical effects on multiple scales. Therefore, advanced computational tools utilizing high-performance computing are essential for accurately modeling them. In the past decade, the US Department of Energy's SciDAC program has produced accelerator-modeling tools that have been employed to tackle some of the most difficult accelerator science problems. Here, the authors discuss the Synergia framework and its applications to high-intensity particle accelerator physics. Synergia is an accelerator simulation package capable of handling the entire spectrum of beam dynamics simulations. The authors present Synergia's design principles and its performance on HPC platforms.