BEAM DYNAMICS USING GRAPHICAL PROCESSING UNITS∗

Simulation of particle beam dynamics in accelerators is computationally expensive, and requires ray-tracing of high numbers of particles to ensure the accuracy of the re-sult, to model collective effects and to reduce the statistical error. Conventional beam tracking tools operate sequen-tially on particle phase space to compute the trajectories of particles through many turns around circular and along lin-ear machines. Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) utilise stream processing techniques to dramatically speed up par-allel computational tasks, and offer considerable perfor-mance benefits to particle beam dynamics processing. In this paper, the application of stream processing to beam dynamics is presented, along with the GPU-based beam dynamics code GPMAD, which exploits the NVidia [1] GPU processor and demonstrates the considerable perfor-mance benefits to particle tracking calculations. The accu-racy and speed of GPMAD is benchmarked using the DIA-MOND [2] Light Source BTS lattice, and the ATF extrac-tion line