Joe Bisognano BISOGNANO@cebaf.gov
Jefferson Lab
12000 Jefferson Avenue,Newport News, VA 23608, USA3mm
The fourth Computational Accelerator Physics Conference,
CAP96, was held September 24-27, 1996, in Williamsburg, Virginia.
This meeting brought together members of the accelerator community
who use and/or develop computer codes for the design and
analysis of particle accelerators and beam transport systems.
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and
the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab)
jointly hosted CAP96, with financial support from the U.S.
Department of Energy's Division of High Energy Physics and the Office of
Naval Research. The conference followed 1988, 1990, and 1993 meetings in
La Jolla, California, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and in Pleasanton,
California. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center will host CAP98.
Some 97 people attended CAP96: 70 from the United States, 7 from Germany, 5 each from France and Switzerland, 4 from Japan, 2 each from Russia and Canada, and 1 each from Italy and the United Kingdom. The program included 42 talks and 31 poster presentations.
Topics ranged from descriptions of specific codes to advanced computing techniques and numerical methods. Update talks were presented on nearly all of the accelerator community's major electromagnetic and particle tracking codes. Like CAP93, the conference included sessions on forward-looking computer methods and technologies such as high-performance computing. A session was added on simulation codes in accelerator control systems, in recognition of their increasingly important role. CAP96 also saw increased attention to the development of object-oriented techniques and specialized class libraries. Scripting languages and their role in building interactive, programmable application software were addressed as well. At the final session, William McCurdy, Thomas Kitchens, Robert Ryne, and Paul Dubois served as panelists for a discussion titled "The Future of Computational Accelerator Physics."
Code demonstrations held throughout the conference included MAPA (John Cary), MAFIA (Martin Timm), OPERA-3D (Chris Riley), UAL/SMF (Nicolay Malitsky), QUICKSILVER (David Seidel), OOPIC (John Verboncouer), COSY INFINITY 7 (Martin Berz), LIDOS (Alexander Durkin), Space-Charge-Dominated Beam Codes (Boris Bondarev), and MICROWAVELAB (John DeFord).
The agenda also afforded opportunities for break-out sessions-smaller meetings on topics of special interest. Robert Ryne organized a break-out session on high-performance computing; the other topics and organizers were high-brightness photo-injectors, Claudio Parazzoli; electromagnetic simulation codes, John Petillo and Alfred Mondelli; applications of the WARP code, Alex Friedman; and the CLASSIC collaboration, John Irwin and Chris Iselin.
On the final evening, after a banquet at Evelynton Plantation in nearby Charles City County, conference participants went outside for a special program of entertainment: the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America in this millennium. The conference ended the next afternoon with a tour of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Jefferson Lab, just southeast of Williamsburg in Newport News. While a nuclear physics experiment continued in one of CEBAF's three experimental halls, participants visited open areas of the facility, saw superconducting accelerating cavities being fabricated, and toured an experimental hall being instrumented for future experiments.
The conference was co-chaired by Al Mondelli (SAIC) and Joe Bisognano (Jefferson Lab). Members of the program committee were Robert Ryne of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Richard Cooper of UCLA, John DeFord of Ansoft, Alex Dragt of the University of Maryland, Kwok Ko and John Irwin of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Leo Michelotti of Fermilab, Johannes van Zeijts of Jefferson Lab, Alex Friedman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and George Gillespie of G. H. Gillespie and Associates.