The proposed Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) Facility, an innovative exotic‐beam facility for production of high‐quality energetic beams of short‐lived isotopes, will contain two superconducting linacs. To produce sufficient intensities of secondary beams the driver linac will provide 400 kW accelerated beams of any ion from hydrogen to uranium. A detailed design has been developed for the focusing‐accelerating lattice of the RIA driver linac which is configured as an array of short SC cavities, each with independently controllable rf phase. To obtain high‐power heavy‐ion beams the driver linac uses simultaneous acceleration of multiple charge states and two strippers. End‐to‐end beam dynamics simulations in six‐dimensional phase space were applied to study all possible sources of beam halo formation in the driver linac. The concept of a “beam‐loss‐free” linac is developed and implies beam halo collimation in designated areas. © 2003 American Institute of Physics