VPIC 2.0: Next Generation Particle-in-Cell Simulations

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 33; no. 4; pp. 952 - 963
• Main Authors: Bird, Robert, Tan, Nigel, Luedtke, Scott V., Harrell, Stephen Lien, Taufer, Michela, Albright, Brian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: 70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY; Hardware; Laser plasma interactions; Layout; Libraries; Mathematical model; Particle accelerators; Particle in cell technique; particle-in-cell; Physics; Plasma interactions; plasma physics; Plasmas; Portability; Shape; Simulation; Supercomputers
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2021.3084795

VPIC is a general purpose particle-in-cell simulation code for modeling plasma phenomena such as magnetic reconnection, fusion, solar weather, and laser-plasma interaction in three dimensions using large numbers of particles. VPIC's capacity in both fidelity and scale makes it particularly well-suited for plasma research on pre-exascale and exascale platforms. In this article, we demonstrate the unique challenges involved in preparing the VPIC code for operation at exascale, outlining important optimizations to make VPIC efficient on accelerators. Specifically, we show the work undertaken in adapting VPIC to exploit the portability-enabling framework Kokkos and highlight the enhancements to VPIC's modeling capabilities to achieve performance at exascale. We assess the achieved performance-portability trade-off through a suite of studies on nine different varieties of modern pre-exascale hardware. Our performance-portability study includes weak-scaling runs on three of the top ten TOP500 supercomputers, as well as a comparison of low-level system performance of hardware from four different vendors.