The PLUTO Code on GPUs: A First Look at Eulerian MHD Methods

TL;DR

This paper introduces gPLUTO, a GPU-accelerated version of the PLUTO code for MHD simulations, demonstrating promising preliminary performance results on high-performance computing architectures.

Contribution

The paper presents a complete rewrite of the PLUTO code in C++ using OpenACC for GPU acceleration, focusing on performance on pre exa-scale systems.

Findings

Demonstrates initial performance gains on NVIDIA GPUs

Shows potential for large-scale plasma physics simulations

Preliminary results indicate good scalability

Abstract

We present preliminary performance results of gPLUTO, the new GPU-optimized implementation of the PLUTO code for computational plasma astrophysics. Like its predecessor, gPLUTO employs a finite-volume formulation to numerically solve the equations of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in multiple spatial dimensions. Still, this new implementation is a complete rewrite in C++ and leverages the OpenACC programming model to achieve acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs. While a more comprehensive description of the code and its several other modules will be presented in a future paper, here we focus on some preparatory results that demonstrate the code potential and performance on pre exa-scale parallel architectures.