HPC Modeling to Aid Accelerator Component Manufacturing

Electromagnetic and particle-beam modeling is an important part of the design and manufacturing of accelerator components, such as electron beam sources and RF accelerating cavities. The premier electromagnetic and particle modeling tools today allow users to exploit parallel computing resources, both distributed memory CPU and multi-threaded GPU. However, these premier parallel modeling tools are too difficult for non-experts to use effectively. The goal of this work is to make it easier for non-experts to learn and integrate the software into the full manufacturing cycle, adding high-performance computing capabilities for high-current particle accelerator simulation that are needed by manufacturers and currently not available. This proposal will be accomplished through collaboration with Tech-X Corporation, a leading accelerator simulation company. High-performance computing is especially critical for the design of superconducting RF electron guns and accelerating booster cavities for high current electron beams. For these systems, the fields induced by the beam itself impact the performance of the accelerating structures. A self consistent solution that treats the cavity fields and the fields of the beam itself is needed. The cost of performing high-current beam testing is prohibitive for repeated iteration of accelerator prototypes, but the input from high-performance computing codes can be used to perform most of this iteration in the design phase. These commercial superconducting accelerators operating at high current can then be designed effectively for many important applications, including novel radioisotope production methods, x-ray sterilization machines, and high-power free electron lasers.