Parallel object-oriented design in Fortran for beam dynamics simulations

In this paper we describe an object-oriented software design approach, using Fortran 90 (F90) and the Message Passing Interface (MPI), for modeling the transport of intense charged particle beams. The object-oriented approach improves the maintainability, reusability, and extensibility of the software, while the use of explicit message passing provides the freedom necessary to achieve high performance. Furthermore, an approach to object-oriented design based on Fortran will help those physicists familiar with procedure-oriented programming to make the transition to object-oriented design. In this paper we describe the implementation of this approach and our success in developing two-dimensional and three-dimensional parallel beam dynamics codes that achieve high performance with only a small overhead associated with the object-oriented design