Exploration of the FleCSI Asynchronous Runtime for Large Scale Plasma Simulations on Heterogeneous Architectures

Modern super computers leverage a mix of CPUs and GPUs to maximize available computing power. This heterogeneity must be specifically accounted for while developing new software to be run on these machines, otherwise significant portions of their power will go unused. With heterogeneous architectures playing an integral role in future plans for exa-scale computer clusters, this will only become increasingly more important. In this talk, we will present our use of LANL’s FleCSI library, an adaptable infrastructure created to facilitate asynchronous multiphysics applications, to develop a new plasma dynamics simulation tool targeted for deployment on exa-scale machines. The impact of performing an asynchronous computation in place of a sequential MPI-based simulation will be discussed, along with realized speedups from offloading work to GPUs via the Kokkos library. Results from large scale simulations relevant to space weather and electron beta decay in supernova fronts will also be shown.