Computational Co-design of a Multiscale Plasma Application: A Process and Initial Results

Abstract

As computer architectures become increasingly heterogeneous the need for algorithms and applications that can exploit these new architectures grows more pressing. This paper demonstrates that co-designing a multi-architecture, multi-scale, highly optimized framework with its associated plasma-physics application can provide both portability across CPUs and accelerators and high performance. Our framework utilizes multiple abstraction layers in order to maximize code reuse between architectures while providing low-level abstractions to incorporate architecture-specific optimizations such as vectorization or hardware fused multiply-add. We describe a co-design process used to enable a plasma physics application to scale well to large systems while also improving on both the accuracy and speed of the simulations. Optimized multi-core results will be presented to demonstrate ability to isolate large amounts of computational work with minimal communication.