About
Our group members include faculty, scientists, postdoctoral fellows and students in the departments of physics, computer science and mathematical sciences. The latest code versions are freely available. A majority of our projects require COSY Infinity to run.
Guiding Principles
We followed five guiding principles to develop these codes:
Beam Physics
Beam physics is often used synonymously with accelerator physics. However, our work in modeling beams and their dynamics, as well as developing new simulation techniques for beam physics, has applications to other areas in addition to accelerator science.
Computational Science
We use computers to directly manipulate functions and their truncated Taylor expansions.
Accuracy and Efficiency
The accuracy and efficiency of a solution depends on the problem it attempts to solve. Given the right circumstances, it’s possible to break any beam dynamics code. We do not recommend using any code without understanding its underlying approximations, limitations and applications.
High Performance Computing
Since algorithmic improvements are usually more effective than hardware improvements, and time doesn't parallelize (strictly speaking), efficient time stepping at varying accuracies is of paramount importance.
Modeling of Particle Interactions
The preceding principles inform our approach to particle interactions. How we model them depends on the purpose of the application. Some considerations include:
- Computational resources.
- Desired precision.
- Balancing run time versus accuracy.
Some of our projects address these topics more effectively than the time stepping mentioned above. We are reaching for the exascale in the next few years, but this doesn’t mean that existing codes need to scale to that extent. Instead, it’s necessary to think about why and when the code was developed. It may have been developed in an era with different computational power availability and application requirements.
