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MAD-X

Short description

MAD-X is an application used world-wide with a long history going back to the 80's in the field of high energy beam physics (i.e. MAD8, MAD9, MADX). It is an all-in-one application with its own scripting language used to design, simulate and optimize particle accelerators: lattice description, machine survey, single particles 6D tracking, optics modeling, beam simulation & analysis, machine optimisation, errors handling, orbit correction, aperture margin and emittance equilibrium.

Web resources

The MAD-X website provides access to information, documentation (PDF), releases (binaries), source code (tarball), e-groups, versioning system (SVN), issues tracking system (Trac), and more... The user manual can be downloaded here.

Technical information

  • Programming Languages used for implementation:

    • Fortran 77, Fortran 90, C, C++ for a total of about 180000 lines of codes.
    • MAD-X scripting language is garbage collected (based on GC Boehm).
    • Build system entirely done with make.
    • Tested every night on server equiped with VMs for supported OS and architectures.

  • Parallelization strategy:

    • Particle tracking (track command) is parallelized with OpenMP if compiled with the proper flags. This is not the default as it does not bring much speed gain (old-style Fortran 77).
    • Compilers vectorize strings, arrays, vectors and matrices computations, and perform loop unrolling plus many other common optimizations done by modern compilers on modern CPU/FPU.

  • Operating systems:

    • Supported on MAC OSX (10.8 or above), Windows (7 or above), Linux (static binary).
    • 32 bit and 64 bit architectures are avalaible.

  • Other prerequisites:

    • No libraries. Scatter plots use gnuplot.

Other information

  • Delivery: 2-3 releases per year.
  • Developed by: Main developpers were H. Grote (MAD8, MADX) and C. Iselin (MAD8, MAD9) in the 90's. Many people contributed to the project since then, see the contributors section on the website.
  • License: Open source software under CERN Copyrights.
  • Contact persons: mad at cern dot ch (see the website for the persons members of the MAD team).
  • Being actively developed and supported: Yes.