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A Space and Bandwidth Efficient Multicore Algorithm for the Particle-in-Cell Method

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Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10777))

Abstract

The Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method allows solving partial differential equation through simulations, with important applications in plasma physics. To simulate thousands of billions of particles on clusters of multicore machines, prior work has proposed hybrid algorithms that combine domain decomposition and particle decomposition with carefully optimized algorithms for handling particles processed on each multicore socket. Regarding the multicore processing, existing algorithms either suffer from suboptimal execution time, due to sorting operations or use of atomic instructions, or suffer from suboptimal space usage. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel algorithm for two-dimensional PIC simulations on multicore hardware that features asymptotically-optimal memory consumption, and does not perform unnecessary accesses to the main memory. In practice, our algorithm reaches 65% of the maximum bandwidth, and shows excellent scalability on the classical Landau damping and two-stream instability test cases.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been carried out within the framework of the EUROfusion Consortium and has received funding from the Euratom Research and Training Programme 2014–2018 under Grant Agreement No. 633053. Simulations were run on the EUROfusion Marconi supercomputer, in the context of the Selavlas project led by K. Kormann. The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS, ICube UMR 7357, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

    Yann Barsamian, Arthur Charguéraud & Alain Ketterlin

  2. Inria, Nancy, France

    Yann Barsamian, Arthur Charguéraud & Alain Ketterlin

Authors
  1. Yann Barsamian
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  2. Arthur Charguéraud
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  3. Alain Ketterlin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yann Barsamian .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Czestochowa University of Technology, Czestochowa, Poland

    Roman Wyrzykowski

  2. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

    Jack Dongarra

  3. University of Southern California, Marina Del Rey, California, USA

    Ewa Deelman

  4. Czestochowa University of Technology, Czestochowa, Poland

    Konrad Karczewski

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Barsamian, Y., Charguéraud, A., Ketterlin, A. (2018). A Space and Bandwidth Efficient Multicore Algorithm for the Particle-in-Cell Method. In: Wyrzykowski, R., Dongarra, J., Deelman, E., Karczewski, K. (eds) Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics. PPAM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10777. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78024-5_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78024-5_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78023-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78024-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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