Analysis of Vector Particle-In-Cell (VPIC) memory usage optimizations on cutting-edge computer architectures

Abstract

Vector Particle-In-Cell (VPIC) is one of the fastest plasma simulation codes in the world, with particle numbers ranging from one trillion on the first petascale system, Roadrunner, to ten trillion particles on the more recent Blue Waters supercomputer. As supercomputers continue to grow rapidly in size, so too does the gap between computing capability and memory capability. Current memory systems limit VPIC simulations greatly as the maximum number of particles that can be simulated directly depends on the available memory. In this study, we present a suite of VPIC memory optimizations (i.e., particle weight, half-precision, and fixed-point optimizations) that enable a significant increase in the number of particles in VPIC simulations. Here, we assess the optimizations’ impact on memory and runtime performance for a suite of cutting-edge computer architectures such has the NVIDIA V100 GPU, the IBM Power9, and the Fujitsu A64FX architectures. Our optimizations enable a 31.25% reduction in memory usage and up to 40% increase in the number of particles. This paper extends our work on developing particle storage format optimizations Tan et al.