Scaling and performance portability of the particle-in-cell scheme for plasma physics applications through mini-apps targeting exascale architectures
Sriramkrishnan Muralikrishnan, Matthias Frey, Alessandro Vinciguerra, Michael Ligotino, Antoine Cerfon, Miroslav Stoyanov, Rahulkumar Gayatri, Andreas Adelmann · Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 2024
We perform a scaling and performance portability study of the electrostatic particle-in-cell scheme for plasma physics applications through a set of mini-apps we name “Alpine”, which can make use of exascale computing capabilities. The mini-apps are based on IPPL, a framework that is designed around performance portable and dimensionality independent particles and fields. We benchmark the simulations with varying parameters, such as grid resolutions (5123 to 20483) and number of simulation particles (109 to 1011), with the following mini-apps: weak and strong Landau damping, bump-on-tail and two-stream instabilities, and the dynamics of an electron bunch in a charge-neutral Penning trap. We show strong and weak scaling and analyze the performance of different components on several pre-exascale architectures, such as Piz-Daint, Cori, Summit, and Perlmutter. While the scaling and portability study helps to identify the performance critical components of the particle-in-cell scheme on the current state-of-the-art computing architectures, the mini-apps by themselves can be used to develop new algorithms and optimize their high performance implementations targeting exascale architectures.