Request for computation time on parallel machines for the study of beam–beam interactions

The control of Beam-Beam Interactions (BBI) in particle colliders is fundamental to preserve beam stability and to achieve the collider maximal luminosity. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at CERN has high intensity beams composed of 5616 particle bunches, each containing 10 protons. This represents a considerable computational challenge, requiring the optimization and parallelization of the algorithms. In the context of the PhD work at EPFL of T. Pieloni, we are now developing a new algorithm for the study of BBI effects. The program, called COherent Multi Bunch Interaction (COMBI), is the first attempt of a multi-bunches approach and by its nature should efficiently run on parallel machines. Hence we request to have access to Mizar for an initial phase of 6 months to optimize and test the scalability of the code with few bunches per beam. After the assessment we wish to have 6 months of production on the BlueGene machine for runs with thousands of bunches per beam and multiple interactions.