VPIC 2.0: Next Generation Particle-in-Cell Simulations

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.

Automated summary

This article discusses the translation of the VPIC code and the challenges of using it for supercomputing, as well as the optimization for efficient operation on accelerators. The paper highlights the enhancement of VPIC's modeling capabilities using the Kokkos framework. The performance-portability trade-off of VPIC is evaluated through a series of studies on different hardware.