SC Conference - Activity Details

Kevin J. Bowers  (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Brian J. Albright  (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Benjamin K. Bergen  (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Lin Yin  (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Kevin J. Barker  (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Darren J. Kerbyson  (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Thursday,  10:30AM - 11:00AM

Room Ballroom G

We demonstrate the performance and scalability of VPIC on the heterogeneous IBM Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. VPIC is a 3d, relativistic, electromagnetic, particle-in-cell (PIC) code that self-consistently evolves a kinetic plasma. We conducted VPIC simulations of laser plasma interaction at unprecedented fidelity and scale---over $10^{12}$ particles and $10^8$ voxels---to model phenomena in inertial confinement fusion experiments. For studies of laser reflectivity versus intensity under experimentally realizable conditions, we measured sustained performance exceeding $0.374$~Pflop/s (sp), the inner loop achieved $0.488$~Pflop/s (sp), enabling first-principles modeling of an issue critical to the DOE/NNSA National Ignition Facility. Notably, given data motion limitations, we achieved this with PIC---a technique that typically requires more data motion per computation than techniques often used to demonstrate supercomputers (like dense matrix, molecular dynamics and Monte-Carlo calculations).

The full paper can be found in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital Library