Sherwood 2015

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Exploiting the Power of Heterogeneous Computing for Kinetic Simulations of Plasmas

Author: Kai Germaschewski
Requested Type: Poster Only
Submitted: 2015-01-19 20:10:16

Co-authors: W. Fox, S. Abbott

Contact Info:
University of New Hampshire
8 College Rd
Durham, New Hampsh   03824
United States

Abstract Text:
Recent increases in supercomputing power, driven by the multi-core
revolution and accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs)
and Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC / Xeon Phi) technology have
enabled kinetic simulations of plasmas at unprecedented resolutions, employing 100,000s of cores or more. However, changing HPC architectures also come with challenges for writing efficient numerical codes.

This presentation describes the Plasma Simulation Code (PSC), an
explicit, electromagnetic particle-in-cell code with support for
different order particle shape functions. We focus on two
distinguishing feature of the code: (1) Dynamic patch-based load
balancing using space-filling curves, which can be crucial to
efficiently perform simulations with highly non-uniform plasma
densities. (2) Support for Nvidia GPUs, which achieves substantial
speed-up of up to 6x on the Cray XK7 architecture of the
"Titan" supercomputer, compared to a CPU-only implementation.

Comments:
If possible, please schedule on Monday or Wednesday.

March 16-18, 2015
The Courant Institute, New York University