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Gyrokinetic toroidal simulations on leading multi- and manycore HPC systems

Conference ·
 [1];  [1];  [1];  [2];  [3];  [1];  [1]
  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  2. Kookmin Univ., Seoul (Korea)
  3. Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States)
The gyrokinetic Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method is a critical computational tool enabling petascale fusion simulation re-search. In this work, we present novel multi- and manycore-centric optimizations to enhance performance of GTC, a PIC-based production code for studying plasma microtur-bulence in tokamak devices. Our optimizations encompass all six GTC sub-routines and include multi-level particle and grid decompositions designed to improve multi-node parallel scaling, particle binning for improved load balance, GPU acceleration of key subroutines, and memory-centric optimizations to improve single-node scaling and reduce memory utilization. The new hybrid MPI-OpenMP and MPI-OpenMP-CUDA GTC versions achieve up to a 2× speedup over the production Fortran code on four parallel systems - clusters based on the AMD Magny-Cours, Intel Nehalem-EP, IBM BlueGene/P, and NVIDIA Fermi architectures. Finally, strong scaling experiments provide insight into parallel scalability, memory utilization, and programmability trade-offs for large-scale gyrokinetic PIC simulations, while attaining a 1.6× speedup on 49,152 XE6 cores.
Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) (SC-24)
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1407109
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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