Parellel beam dynamics calculations on high performance computers
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.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 414614
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-96-4642; CONF-9609256-8; ON: DE97001726; TRN: 97:000075
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: CAP `96: 1996 computational accelerator physics conference, Williamsburg, VA (United States), 24-27 Sep 1996; Other Information: PBD: 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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