Case Study: Queen Mary University of London achieves order-of-magnitude faster ILC simulations with MathWorks

Research Engineers Advance Control System Design of the International Linear Collider

Queen Mary University of London needed to design a real‑time beam alignment control system for the International Linear Collider, requiring comprehensive 20 km accelerator models that track millions of particles and hundreds of scenarios to account for ground motion and other disturbances. To meet this challenge, the research team turned to MathWorks, using MATLAB and Simulink along with Parallel Computing Toolbox, Instrument Control Toolbox, and Simulink Coder to build, simulate, and test the control system on a high‑throughput cluster.

Using MathWorks tools, the team consolidated existing models in MATLAB, developed the control algorithms in Simulink, and ran more than 100 simulations in parallel with Parallel Computing Toolbox—achieving a linear speedup that reduced simulation time by an order of magnitude (a single simulation can take up to three days, and 100 runs that once took hundreds of days now complete in the time of one). MathWorks solutions also enabled hardware testing via Instrument Control Toolbox and real‑time implementation with Simulink Coder, delivering integrated development, reuse of C/C++ components, and substantial acceleration of the ILC design effort.

Queen Mary University of London

Glen White

Research Fellow