Porting WarpX to GPU-accelerated platforms

WarpX is a general purpose electromagnetic particle-in-cell code that was originally designed to run on many core CPU architectures. We describe the strategy, based on the AMReX library, followed to allow WarpX to use the GPU-accelerated nodes on OLCF's Summit supercomputer, a strategy we believe will extend to the upcoming machines Frontier and Aurora. We summarize the challenges encountered, lessons learned, and give current performance results on a series of relevant benchmark problems.

Automated summary

WarpX is a general-purpose electromagnetic particle-in-cell code that was originally designed to run on multi-core CPU architectures. Through the strategy based on the AMReX library, it can now utilize GPU-accelerated nodes on OLCF's Summit supercomputer. The research summarizes the encountered challenges, lessons learned, and current performance results on relevant benchmark problems.