Developing peta-scalable algorithms for beam dynamic simulations

Peta-scalable software packages for beam dynamic simulations are being developed and used at Argonne national laboratory. The standard Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method and direct Vlasov solvers in up to 4 dimensions have been developed and benchmarked with respect to each other. Both of them have successfully run on 32 thousands processors on BG/P at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Peta-scale computing facility at ANL provides suitable environment for simulating beams in large scale. We have simulated charged beams through traditional PIC method as well as direct solving of the Vlasov equation in higher dimensions. Several scalable Poisson solvers have been developed and incorporated with these methods. High-order numerical methods have been adopted for solving the Poisson and Vlasov equations. Preliminary results on direct Vlasov solvers have been obtained in up to 4 dimensions. Domain decomposition method has been used for the parallelization in these software packages, and good scaling has been achieved. These packages have been successfully applied in end-to-end simulation of linear accelerators and large scale accelerator design optimizations. There are still lots of places can be improved for the PIC method and lots of challenges exist in the direct Vlasov solvers, therefore, more efforts are needed in both algorithms and applications.