3D gyrokinetic particle-in-cell simulation of fusion plasma microturbulence on parallel computers
One of the grand challenge problems now supported by HPCC is the Numerical Tokamak Project. A goal of this project is the study of low-frequency microinstabilities in tokamak plasmas, which are believed to cause energy loss via turbulent thermal transport across the magnetic field lines. An important tool in this study is gyrokinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. Gyrokinetic, as opposed to fully-kinetic, methods are particularly well suited to the task because they are optimized to study the frequency and wavelength domain of the microinstabilities. Furthermore, many researchers now employ low-noise {delta}f methods to greatly reduce statistical noise by modelling only the perturbation of the gyrokinetic distribution function from a fixed background, not the entire distribution function. In spite of the increased efficiency of these improved algorithms over conventional PIC algorithms, gyrokinetic PIC simulations of tokamak fully-vectorized codes on vector supercomputers. For this reason, we have worked for several years to redevelop these codes on massively parallel computers. We have developed 3D gyrokinetic PIC simulation codes for SIMD and MIMD parallel processors, using control-parallel, data-parallel, and domain-decomposition message-passing (DDMP) programming paradigms. This poster summarizes our earlier work on codes for the Connection Machine and BBN TC2000, and our development of a generic DDMP code for distributed-memory parallel machines. We discuss the memory-access issues which are of key importance in writing parallel PIC codes, with special emphasis on issues peculiar to gyrokinetic PIC. We outline the domain decompositions in our new DDMP code and discuss the interplay of different domain decompositions suited for the particle-pushing and field-solution components of the PIC algorithm.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 10153607
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-JC-111840; CONF-930372-10; ON: DE93012503
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 1993 international simulators conference on high performance computing,Arlington, VA (United States),29 Mar - 1 Apr 1993; Other Information: PBD: Dec 1992
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
PLASMA MICROINSTABILITIES
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
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TURBULENCE
ARRAY PROCESSORS
MAGNETIC FIELDS
DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS
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PERFORMANCE
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