HiPACE++: a portable, 3D quasi-static Particle-in-Cell code

TL;DR

HiPACE++ is a portable, efficient 3D quasi-static Particle-in-Cell code that leverages GPU acceleration and domain decomposition for high performance in plasma accelerator simulations.

Contribution

It introduces the first performance-portable, 3D quasi-static Particle-in-Cell code with GPU optimization and scalable parallelization techniques.

Findings

Orders-of-magnitude speedup on GPUs over CPUs

Near-linear scaling from 1 to 512 GPUs

Open-source, modular design for diverse computing environments

Abstract

Modeling plasma accelerators is a computationally challenging task and the quasi-static particle-in-cell algorithm is a method of choice in a wide range of situations. In this work, we present the first performance-portable, quasi-static, three-dimensional particle-in-cell code HiPACE++. By decomposing all the computation of a 3D domain in successive 2D transverse operations and choosing appropriate memory management, HiPACE++ demonstrates orders-of-magnitude speedups on modern scientific GPUs over CPU-only implementations. The 2D transverse operations are performed on a single GPU, avoiding time-consuming communications. The longitudinal parallelization is done through temporal domain decomposition, enabling near-optimal strong scaling from 1 to 512 GPUs. HiPACE++ is a modular, open-source code enabling efficient modeling of plasma accelerators from laptops to state-of-the-art supercomputers.