A Space and Bandwidth Efficient Multicore Algorithm for the Particle-in-Cell Method

Yann A Barsamian (1, 2) , Arthur Charguéraud (1, 2) , Alain Ketterlin (2, 1)

1 CAMUS - Compilation pour les Architectures MUlti-coeurS
2 ICube - Laboratoire des sciences de l'ingénieur, de l'informatique et de l'imagerie

The Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method allows solving partial differential equation through simulations, with important applications in plasma physics. To simulate thousands of billions of particles on clusters of multicore machines, prior work has proposed hybrid algorithms that combine domain decomposition and particle decomposition with carefully optimized algorithms for handling particles processed on each multicore socket. Regarding the multicore processing, existing algorithms either suffer from suboptimal execution time, due to sorting operations or use of atomic instructions, or suffer from suboptimal space usage. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel algorithm for two-dimensional PIC simulations on multicore hardware that features asymptotically-optimal memory consumption, and does not perform unnecessary accesses to the main memory. In practice, our algorithm reaches 65% of the maximum bandwidth, and shows excellent scalability on the classical Landau damping and two-stream instability test cases.

Mots clés: Particle-in-Cell simulation; Plasma physics; Strong scaling; Weak scaling; Hybrid parallelism; SIMD architecture

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Yann A Barsamian, Arthur Charguéraud, Alain Ketterlin. A Space and Bandwidth Efficient Multicore Algorithm for the Particle-in-Cell Method. PPAM 2017 - 12th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, Sep 2017, Lublin, Poland. pp.1-12. ⟨hal-01649172⟩