PIConGPU: A Fully Relativistic Particle-in-Cell Code for a GPU Cluster
Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf e.V., Dresden, Germany
IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science (2010)
@article{burau2010picongpu,
title={PIConGPU: A Fully Relativistic Particle-in-Cell Code for a GPU Cluster},
author={Burau, H. and Widera, R. and Honig, W. and Juckeland, G. and Debus, A. and Kluge, T. and Schramm, U. and Cowan, T.E. and Sauerbrey, R. and Bussmann, M.},
journal={Plasma Science, IEEE Transactions on},
volume={38},
number={10},
pages={2831–2839},
issn={0093-3813},
year={2010},
publisher={IEEE}
}
The particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm is one of the most widely used algorithms in computational plasma physics. With the advent of graphical processing units (GPUs), large-scale plasma simulations on inexpensive GPU clusters are in reach. We present an implementation of a fully relativistic plasma PIC algorithm for GPUs based on the NVIDIA CUDA library. It supports a hybrid architecture consisting of single computation nodes interconnected in a standard cluster topology, with each node carrying one or more GPUs. The internode communication is realized using the message-passing interface. The simulation code PIConGPU presented in this paper is, to our knowledge, the first scalable GPU cluster implementation of the PIC algorithm in plasma physics.
November 7, 2010 by hgpu
