OPAL includes various beam line element descriptions and methods for single particle optics, namely maps up to arbitrary order, symplectic integration schemes and lastly time integration. OPAL is based on IPPL (Independent Parallel Particle Layer) which adds parallel capabilities. Main functions inherited from IPPL are: structured rectangular grids, fields and parallel FFT and particles with the respective interpolation operators. Other features are, expression templates and massive parallelism (up to 8000 processors) which makes is possible to tackle the largest problems in the field.
OPAL Introduction Lecture 1 (a bit outdated)
OPAL ETC -> Movies shown in the presentation m1 ... m2
OPAL ECPM Presentation in the educational section of the ECPM meeting 2009 in Groningen
Particle based simulations of accelerator beam-lines, especially in six dimensional phase space, generate vast amounts of data. Even though a subset of statistical information regarding phase space or analysis needs to be preserved, reading and writing such enormous restart files on massively parallel supercomputing systems remains challenging.
H5hut is a very simple data storage schema and provides an API that simplifies the reading/writing of the data to the HDF5 file format. An important foundation for a stable visualization and data analysis environment is a stable and portable file storage format and its associated APIs. The presence of a "common file storage format," including associated APIs, will help foster a fundamental level of interoperability across the project's software infrastructure. It will also help ensure that key data analysis capabilities are present during the earliest phases of the software development effort.
H5hut is built on top of the HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format). HDF5 offers a self-describing machine-independent binary file format that supports scalable parallel I/O performance for MPI codes on a variety of supercomputing systems, and works equally well on laptop computers. The API is available for C, C++, and Fortran codes. The H5Part file format and APIs enable disparate research groups with different simulation implementations to transparently share datasets and data analysis tools. For instance, the common file format will enable groups that depend on completely different simulation implementations to share data analysis tools.
Home of H5Hut with Source Code documentation and more