Parallel beam dynamics calculations on high performance computers

Abstract

Faced with a backlog of nuclear waste and weapons plutonium, as well as an ever-increasing public concern about safety and environmental issues associated with conventional nuclear reactors, many countries are studying new, accelerator-driven technologies that hold the promise of providing safe and effective solutions to these problems. Proposed projects include accelerator transmutation of waste (ATW), accelerator-based conversion of plutonium (ABC), accelerator-driven energy production (ADEP), and accelerator production of tritium (APT). Also, next-generation spallation neutron sources based on similar technology will play a major role in materials science and biological science research. The design of accelerators for these projects will require a major advance in numerical modeling capability. For example, beam dynamics simulations with approximately 100 million particles will be needed to ensure that extremely stringent beam loss requirements (less than a nanoampere per meter) can be met. Compared with typical present-day modeling using 10,000–100,000 particles, this represents an increase of 3–4 orders of magnitude. High performance computing (HPC) platforms make it possible to perform such large scale simulations, which require 10’s of GBytes of memory. They also make it possible to perform smaller simulations in a matter of hours that would require months to run on a single processor workstation. This paper will describe how HPC platforms can be used to perform the numerically intensive beam dynamics simulations required for development of these new accelerator-driven technologies.