CERN Accelerating science

Article
Title	A Parallel Simplex Optimizer and Its Application to High-Brightness Storage Ring Design
Author(s)	Shang, Hairong ; Borland, Michael
Affiliation	(ANL, Argonne, Illinois)
Publication	2005
In:	21st IEEE Particle Accelerator Conference, Knoxville, TN, USA, 16 - 20 May 2005, pp.4230
Subject category	Accelerators and Storage Rings
Abstract	Optimization is commonly used in accelerator design to find linear optics solutions. Such optimizations are usually fairly fast as linear optics computations are themselves fast. For high-brightness storage rings, optimization of nonlinear elements (e.g., sextupoles) is also important in obtaining sufficient dynamic aperture. However, this can be very time onsuming as the basic calculations are time consuming. We have developed an efficient parallel Simplex optimizer that runs on a Linux cluster. It can optimize the result of running essentially any program or script that returns a penalty function value. We have used this optimizer with elegant to optimize dynamic aperture of storage ring designs. We discuss the optimization algorithm and performance, design of penalty functions, and optimization results.