Paper by ECE-NTUA Ph.D. student Konstantinos Iliakis receives the Best Paper Award at Computing Frontiers 2020


We are pleased to announce that the paper entitled “Scale-Out Beam Longitudinal Dynamics Simulations” received the Best Paper Award in the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers 2020 (CF’20) that was held on June 1-10, 2020, in Italy. The award-winning paper was co-authored by Konstantinos Iliakis, Helga Timko, Sotirios Xydis and Dimitrios Soudris (ECE-NTUA Professor).

This paper discusses the details and challenges of implementing a distributed, HPC Accelerator Physics scientific simulator, for the purposes of the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN. At CERN, physicists use large scale particle accelerators to accelerate and the collide high-energy charged particles in order to study the fundamental laws of particle physics, and probe the origins of our universe. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most powerful collider on earth with a circumference of 27km and a peak colliding energy of 15 TeV.

Operating existing synchrotrons, planning for the ongoing machine upgrades and designing future machines, like the recently announced, 21B € budget, Future Circular Collider (FCC) require extensive and extremely accurate simulations, with tight technological and budgetary constraints. The Beam Longitudinal Dynamics (BLonD) simulator suite fulfills these critical requirements. The Hybrid-BLonD enables scale-out simulations and demonstrates scalable behavior up to more than 600 cores, effectively cutting down the execution time of previously month-long simulations to a single day. Scientists can now experiment with larger configurations, and integrate more complex phenomena in their simulations, that lead to the understanding and discovery of physics effects, for the first time ever.

For more information, check out the video presentation at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLTQi7kjU-c&feature=youtu.be and the full paper at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3387902.3392616.

*Please email information about ECE-NTUA student and alumni awards to publicity@ece.ntua.gr