Optimising PICCANTE - an Open Source Particle-in-Cell Code for Advanced Simulations on Tier-0 Systems

Abstract: We present a detailed strong and weak scaling analysis of PICCANTE, an open source, massively parallel, fully-relativistic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code. PIC codes are widely used in plasma physics and astrophysics to study the cases where kinetic effects are relevant. PICCANTE is primarily developed to study laser-plasma interaction. Within a PRACE Preparatory Access Project, various revisions of different routines of the code have been analysed on the HPC systems JUQUEEN at Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Germany, and FERMI at CINECA, Italy, to improve scalability and I/O performance of the application. The diagnostic tool Scalasca is used to identify suboptimal routines. Different output strategies are discussed. The detailed strong and weak scaling behaviour of the improved code are presented in comparison with the original version of the code.