Workshops Archive

Bridging Performance Portability and Scalability for Plasma Simulations on Heterogeneous Systems

Workshop: 2025 International Workshop on Performance, Portability, and Productivity in HPC (P3HPC)

Authors: Nigel P. Tan (Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)); Scott V. Luedtke (Los Alamos National Laboratory); Michela Taufer (University of Tennessee, Knoxville); and Brian Albright (Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL))

Abstract: Bridging portability and scalability is essential for HPC applications. The Vector Particle-In-Cell (VPIC) code, widely used in plasma physics simulations, historically required extensive platform-specific optimizations to achieve high performance. VPIC 2.0 addresses this challenge by adopting Kokkos for performance portability, enabling it to scale effectively across diverse architectures, including CPUs and GPUs. However, the abstractions introduced by Kokkos can obscure hardware-specific capabilities and introduce performance overhead. In this work, we mitigate these overheads by enhancing vectorization and optimizing memory access patterns through platform-targeted particle sorting in VPIC 2.0. These optimizations enable VPIC 2.0 to match the performance of the highly tuned, hardware specific VPIC 1.2 on CPUs and to achieve superlinear scaling on GPUs.

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