PM2D: A parallel GPU-based code for the kinetic simulation of laser plasma instabilities in large scale plasmas

TL;DR

This paper introduces PM2D, a GPU-accelerated kinetic simulation code for laser plasma instabilities that offers high accuracy, reduced computational cost, and robustness for large-scale inertial confinement fusion research.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel 2D GPU code, PM2D, specifically designed for simulating laser plasma instabilities with lower noise and computational cost than traditional PIC codes.

Findings

PM2D can simulate LPIs with billions of mesh grids.

The code reduces macro particles needed, lowering simulation costs.

PM2D demonstrates robustness and low numerical noise in long-time simulations.

Abstract

Laser plasma instabilities (LPIs) have significant influences on the laser energy deposition efficiency, hot electron generation, and uniformity of irradiation in inertial confined fusion (ICF). In contrast to theoretical analysis of linear development of LPIs, numerical simulations play a more and more important role in revealing the complex physics of LPIs. Since LPIs are typically a three-wave coupling process, the precise kinetic simulation of LPIs requires to resolve the laser period (around one femtosecond) and laser wavelength (less than one micron). In this paper, a full wave fluid model of LPIs is constructed and numerically solved by the particle-mesh method, where the plasma is described by macro particles that can move across the mesh grids freely. Based upon this model, a two-dimensional (2D) GPU code named PM2D is developed. It can simulate the kinetic effects of LPIs self-consistently as normal particle-in-cell (PIC) codes. Moreover, as the physical model adopted in the PM2D code is specifically constructed for LPIs, the required macro particles per grid in the simulations can be largely reduced and thus overall simulation cost is considerably reduced comparing with typical PIC codes. Moreover, the numerical noise in our PM2D code is much lower, which makes it more robust than PIC codes in the simulation of LPIs for the long-time scale above 10 picoseconds. After the distributed computing is realized, our PM2D code is able to run on GPU clusters with a total mesh grids up to several billions, which meets the typical requirements for the simulations of LPIs at ICF experimental scale with reasonable cost.