A unified approach to building accelerator simulation software for the SSC

A large body of software is being developed to simulate the physics and high-level operation of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The state of the SSC simulation software is described, with emphasis on addressing the uniform interface needs by using a standardized data set format and object-oriented approaches to graphics and modeling. It is noted that if this software is to form a unified and flexible whole, it is necessary to solve a number of software engineering problems that will otherwise render the system so bulky as to become effectively useless. To this end, the authors envision (1) the self-describing data standard as providing a software bus on which programs can be plugged in to talk with one another and data transparently moved across heterogeneous networks; (2) a library of InterViews-based graphics classes to provide a way to create new interfaces rapidly and to ensure uniformity across all interfaces; and (3) a library of model/machine classes to make it possible to generalize the simulation to a variety of models of the accelerator and, ultimately, to the actual machine