Contribution of Peter Messmer
Title
Plasma Simulations on Emerging Hardware Architectures
Topics
"Explosive fate of stars"
Keywords
Plasma Simulations, Particle-in-Cell, GPU computing, Petascale Computing
Abstract
One of the key challenges in simulating astrophysical plasmas is the broad range of scales and the resulting richness of the physical phenomena. Modeling efforts therefore need to find a balance between physical fidelity and computational feasibility. One approach to overcome this challenge is to choose appropriate algorithms for the individual scales and couple them into multi-scale/multi-physics simulations. Alernatively on relies on powerful computer hardware to simulate large scales by brute forcing an algorithm best suited for the smallest scale. The large degree of parallelism and heterogeneity found in modern supercomputers requires novel solutions for both of these approaches. In this talk, we will present strategies and results for utilizing petascale and GPU accelerated systems for plasma simulations, with a particular focus on kinetic models.
