Three Dimensional Pseudo-Spectral Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic GPU Code for Astrophysical Plasma Simulation

Abstract

This paper presents the benchmarking and scaling studies of a GPU accelerated three dimensional compressible magnetohydrodynamic code. The code is developed keeping an eye to explain the large and intermediate scale magnetic field generation is cosmos as well as in nuclear fusion reactors in the light of the theory given by Eugene Newman Parker. The spatial derivatives of the code are pseudo-spectral method based and the time solvers are explicit. GPU acceleration is achieved with minimal code changes through OpenACC parallelization and use of NVIDIA CUDA Fast Fourier Transform library (cuFFT). NVIDIA's unified memory is leveraged to enable oversubscription of the GPU device memory for seamless out-of-core processing of large grids. Our experimental results indicate that the GPU accelerated code is able to achieve upto two orders of magnitude speedup over a corresponding OpenMP parallel, FFTW library based code, on a NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU. For large grids that require out-of-core processing on the GPU, we see a 7x speedup over the OpenMP, FFTW based code, on the Tesla P100 GPU. We also present performance analysis of the GPU accelerated code on different GPU architectures - Kepler, Pascal and Volta.