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SixTrack is a single-particle tracking code for high-energy circular accelerators routinely used at CERN for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), its luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC), the Future Circular Collider (FCC) and the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) simulations. The code is based on a 6D symplectic tracking engine, which is optimized for long-term tracking simulations and delivers fully reproducible results on several platforms. It also includes multiple scattering engines for beam–matter interaction studies, as well as facilities to run the integrated simulations with external particle matter interaction codes. These features differentiate SixTrack from general-purpose, optics-design software. The code recently underwent a major restructuring to merge the advanced features into a single branch, such as multiple ion species, interface with external codes and high-performance input/output. This restructuring also removed a large number of compilation flags, instead enabling/disabling the functionality with runtime options. In the process, the code was moved from Fortran 77 to Fortran 2018 standard, also allowing and achieving a better modularization. Physics models (beam–beam effects, Radio-Frequency (RF) multipoles, current carrying wires, solenoid and electron lenses) and methods (symplecticity check) have also been reviewed and refined to offer more accurate results. The SixDesk runtime environment allows the user to manage the large batches of simulations required for accurate predictions of the dynamic aperture. SixDesk supports several cluster environments available at CERN as well as submitting jobs to the LHC@Home volunteering computing project, which enables volunteers contributing with their hardware to CERN simulation. SixTrackLib is a new library aimed at providing a portable and flexible tracking engine for single- and multi-particle problems using the models and formalism of SixTrack. The library is able to run in CPUs as well as graphical processing units (GPUs). This contribution presents the status of the code, summarizes the main existing features and provides details about the main development lines SixTrack, SixDesk and SixTrackLib.

Abstract:The LHC@Home BOINC project has provided computing capacity for numerical simulations to researchers at CERN since 2004, and has since 2011 been expanded with a wider range of applications. The traditional CERN accelerator physics simulation code SixTrack enjoys continuing volunteers support, and thanks to virtualisation a number of applications from the LHC experiment collaborations and particle theory groups have joined the consolidated LHC@Home BOINC project. This paper addresses the challenges related to traditional and virtualized applications in the BOINC environment, and how volunteer computing has been integrated into the overall computing strategy of the laboratory through the consolidated LHC@Home service. Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining LHC@Home, numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, yielding an improved understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. The main results are highlighted in this paper.

Abstract. Following the successful inclusion of virtualisation to volunteer computing for theory simulations back in 2011, the use of volunteer computing with BOINC and CernVM has been extended to cover simulations for the LHC experiments ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. This paper describes the status of the BOINC volunteer computing platform at CERN used for LHC@home and how it has been designed to address a heterogeneous environment of different user communities with different computing infrastructure. The aim of the recent developments is to provide a volunteer computing platform that the experiments can build upon to exploit opportunistic resources. Furthermore, new developments of common solutions to span user authentication domains are explained.

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