Abstract
Despite the recent successes of nuclear energy researchers, the scientific community still remains some distance from being able to create controlled, self-sustaining fusion reactions. Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) techniques represent one possible option to surpass this barrier, with scientific simulation playing a leading role in guiding and supporting their development. The simulation of such techniques allows for safe and efficient investigation of laser design and pulse shaping, as well as providing insight into the reaction as a whole. The research presented here focuses on the simulation code EPOCH, a fully relativistic particle-in-cell plasma physics code concerned with faithfully recreating laser-plasma interactions at scale. A significant challenge in developing large codes like EPOCH is maintaining effective scientific delivery on successive generations of high-performance computing architecture. To support this process, we adopt the use of mini-applications – small code proxies that encapsulate important computational properties of their larger parent counterparts. Through the development of a mini-application for EPOCH (called miniEPOCH), we investigate a variety of the performance features exhibited in EPOCH, expose opportunities for optimisation and increased scientific capability, and offer our conclusions to guide future changes to similar ICF codes.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 570-581 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications |
Volume | 32 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research is supported in part by the EPSRC grant ‘‘A Radiation Hydrodynamic ALE Code for Laser Fusion Energy’’ (EP/I029117/1), by The Royal Society, through their Industry Fellowship Scheme (IF090020/AM) and by AWE through the Warwick-hosted Centre for Computational Plasma Physics. Use of ARCHER was supported by several Resource Allocation Panel (RAP) awards, including ‘‘High-level Abstractions for Performance, Portability and Continuity of Scientific Software on Future Computing
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2016.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Hardware and Architecture