VPIC 2.0: Next Generation Particle-in-Cell Simulations

Abstract

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 paper 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.

References in corpus (5)

• Particle-in-cell simulations of pair discharges in a starved magnetosphere of a Kerr black hole
• Determining the Dominant Acceleration Mechanism during Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection in Large-scale Systems
• Angular Momentum Transport and Particle Acceleration during Magnetorotational Instability in a Kinetic Accretion Disk
• Plasma Energization in Colliding Magnetic Flux Ropes
• Performance-Portable Many-Core Plasma Simulations: Porting PIConGPU to OpenPower and Beyond

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Magnetic reconnection in the era of exascale computing and multiscale experiments
• PIC methods in astrophysics: Simulations of relativistic jets and kinetic physics in astrophysical systems
• HiPACE++: a portable, 3D quasi-static Particle-in-Cell code
• Hybrid-VPIC: an Open-Source Kinetic/Fluid Hybrid Particle-in-Cell Code
• Confinement performance predictions for a high field axisymmetric tandem mirror
• The Magnetohydrodynamic-Particle-In-Cell Module in Athena++: Implementation and Code Tests
• PICSAR-QED: a Monte Carlo module to simulate Strong-Field Quantum Electrodynamics in Particle-In-Cell codes for exascale architectures
• A Particle-In-Cell Code Comparison for Ion Acceleration: EPOCH, LSP, and WarpX
• Distributed computing for physics-based data-driven reduced modeling at scale: Application to a rotating detonation rocket engine
• An extended hydrodynamics model for inertial confinement fusion hohlraums
• Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection with Advanced Maxwell Solver Algorithms
• Explicit energy-conserving modification of relativistic PIC method
• Optimized event generator for strong-field QED simulations within the hi-$\chi$ framework
• Fast prediction of plasma instabilities with sparse-grid-accelerated optimized dynamic mode decomposition
• Plasma refilling of the lunar wake: plasma-vacuum interactions, electrostatic shocks, and electromagnetic instabilities
• Intensity and Dimensionality-Dependent Dynamics of Laser-Proton Acceleration in 1D, 2D, and 3D Particle-in-Cell Simulations