A Portable Multi-GPU Solver for Collisional Plasmas with Coulombic Interactions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Almgren-Bell, James, Awar, Nader Al, Geethakrishnan, Dilip S, Gligoric, Milos, Biros, George
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Almgren-Bell, James
Awar, Nader Al
Geethakrishnan, Dilip S
Gligoric, Milos
Biros, George
author_facet Almgren-Bell, James
Awar, Nader Al
Geethakrishnan, Dilip S
Gligoric, Milos
Biros, George
contents We study parallel particle-in-cell (PIC) methods for low-temperature plasmas (LTPs), which discretize kinetic formulations that capture the time evolution of the probability density function of particles as a function of position and velocity. We use a kinetic description for electrons and a fluid approximation for heavy species. In this paper, we focus on GPU acceleration of algorithms for velocity-space interactions and in particular, collisions of electrons with neutrals, ions, and electrons. Our work has two thrusts. The first is algorithmic exploration and analysis. The second is examining the viability of rapid-prototyping implementations using Python-based HPC tools, in particular PyKokkos. We discuss several common PIC kernels and present performance results on NVIDIA Volta V100 and AMD MI250X GPUs. Overall, the MI250X is slightly faster for most kernels but shows more sensitivity to register pressure. We also report scaling results for a distributed memory implementation on up to 16 MPI ranks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06771
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Portable Multi-GPU Solver for Collisional Plasmas with Coulombic Interactions
Almgren-Bell, James
Awar, Nader Al
Geethakrishnan, Dilip S
Gligoric, Milos
Biros, George
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
We study parallel particle-in-cell (PIC) methods for low-temperature plasmas (LTPs), which discretize kinetic formulations that capture the time evolution of the probability density function of particles as a function of position and velocity. We use a kinetic description for electrons and a fluid approximation for heavy species. In this paper, we focus on GPU acceleration of algorithms for velocity-space interactions and in particular, collisions of electrons with neutrals, ions, and electrons. Our work has two thrusts. The first is algorithmic exploration and analysis. The second is examining the viability of rapid-prototyping implementations using Python-based HPC tools, in particular PyKokkos. We discuss several common PIC kernels and present performance results on NVIDIA Volta V100 and AMD MI250X GPUs. Overall, the MI250X is slightly faster for most kernels but shows more sensitivity to register pressure. We also report scaling results for a distributed memory implementation on up to 16 MPI ranks.
title A Portable Multi-GPU Solver for Collisional Plasmas with Coulombic Interactions
topic Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06771