GSoC 2017 Projects Related To SixTrack

SixTrack is a software for simulating and analysing the trajectory of high energy particles in accelerators. It has been used in the design and optimization of the LHC and is now being used to design the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade that will be installed in the next decade. Sixtrack has been adapted to take advantage of large scale volunteer computing resources provided by the LHC@Home project. It has been engineered to give the exact same results after millions of operations on several, very different computer platforms. The source code is written in Fortran, and is pre-processed by two programs that assemble the code blocks and provide automatic differentiation of the equation of motions. The code relies on the crlibm library, careful arrangement of parenthesis, dedicated input/output and selected compilation flags for the most common compilers to provide identical results on different platforms and operating systems. An option enables the use of the Boinc library for volunteer computing. A running environment SixDesk is used to generate input files, split simulations for LHC@Home (link sends e-mail) or CERN cluster and collect the results for the user. SixTrack is licensed under LGPLv2.1.

A strong background in computer science and programming languages as well the interest to understand computational physics methods implemented in the code are sought. The unique challenge will be offered to work with a high-performance production code that is used for the highest energy accelerator in the world - and thus the code’s reliability and backward compatibility cannot be compromised. There will be the opportunity to learn about methods used in simulating the motion of particles in accelerators.

Project Proposals