hPIC2: A hardware-accelerated, hybrid particle-in-cell code for dynamic plasma-material interactions

• Published in: Computer physics communications Vol. 283; p. 108569
• Main Authors: Meredith, L.T., Rezazadeh, M., Huq, M.F., Drobny, J., Srinivasaragavan, V.V., Sahni, O., Curreli, D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.02.2023
• Subjects: Binary-collision approximation; High-performance computing; Particle-in-cell; Plasma; Plasma-material interactions; Plasma; Binary-collision approximation; High-performance computing; Particle-in-cell; Plasma-material interactions
• ISSN: 0010-4655; 1879-2944
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2022.108569

The exascale era of high performance computing promises to bring the field of computational plasma physics ever closer to the goal of accurate multiscale modeling. Such computers will rely on hardware acceleration to offload work to dedicated components, notably general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs). However, devices from different manufacturers require software to be written with different parallel programming models, greatly increasing the code maintenance burden of applications designed to perform on more than one such device. hPIC2 is a hybrid plasma simulation code developed with the Kokkos performance portability framework to target the architectures that will drive exascale computing for the foreseeable future. As a hybrid simulation code, hPIC2 investigates the simultaneous use of various plasma models on the same domain, at the same time. hPIC2 also optionally couples to RustBCA, which accurately models ion-material interactions using the binary collision approximation (BCA) method [1]. hPIC2 therefore achieves scalable performance on a variety of computing architectures when simulating complex and diverse plasmas, particularly near plasma-material interfaces.