SDDS-based software tools for accelerntor design

The self-describing data set (SDDS) file protocol is a standardized way to store and access data and is the basis of an extensive toolkit. It is also the file protocol used for many accelerator design tools. Over the years, several of these SDDS-compliant accelerator programs (e.g., clinchor, elegant, estat, shower, and spiffe) have been developed at the Advanced Photon Source. Also, existing accelerator design tools for which the source code is available (e.g., ABCI, GENESIS, GINGER, MAFIA, and URMEL) have been converted to read and write SDDS files. As a result, we now have a capable set of accelerator codes that make use of the same data format and the same pre- and postprocessing suite. Further, the SDDS toolkit program sddsoptimize can be used around any of these tools or around a script that runs one or more of these tools. This provides the capability of very general, multicode optimization. In this paper, we discuss the capabilities of the existing SDDS-compliant accelerator codes, then provide examples of applications of these tools