High-performance orbit-following code ASCOT5 for Monte Carlo simulations in fusion plasmas

TL;DR

ASCOT5 is a high-performance Monte Carlo code for simulating particle behavior in fusion plasmas, leveraging hybrid parallelism and SIMD to significantly boost computational efficiency while accurately modeling neoclassical transport.

Contribution

The paper introduces ASCOT5, a novel, highly optimized Monte Carlo particle-following code for fusion plasma simulations, with improved performance and validated physics models.

Findings

Up to 6-fold performance increase over previous version

Accurate reproduction of neoclassical diffusion in various regimes

Successful validation against theoretical and previous simulation results

Abstract

We present a novel implementation of a Monte Carlo particle-following code for solving the distribution function of minority species in fusion plasmas, called ASCOT5, and verify it using theoretical results for neoclassical transport. The code has been developed from ground up with an OpenMP-MPI hybrid paradigm to take full advantage of current and next generation many-core CPUs with multithreading and SIMD operations. Up to 6-fold increase in performance is demonstrated compared to a previous version of the code which only utilizes MPI. The physics model of the code is comprehensively validated against existing theoretical work, and it is shown to faithfully reproduce neoclassical diffusion across three different collisionality regimes. In simulations for realistic tokamak plasmas, including complex non-axisymmetric geometry, ASCOT5 is verified to reproduce results from the previous version ASCOT4.