Improvements of the particle-in-cell code EUTERPE for petascaling machines Original Research Article

In the present work we report some performance measures and computational improvements recently carried out using the gyrokinetic code EUTERPE (Jost, 2000 and Jost et al., 1999 ), which is based on the general particle-in-cell (PIC) method. The scalability of the code has been studied for up to sixty thousand processing elements and some steps towards a complete hybridization of the code were made. As a numerical example, non-linear simulations of Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG) instabilities have been carried out in screw-pinch geometry and the results are compared with earlier works. A parametric study of the influence of variables (step size of the time integrator, number of markers, grid size) on the quality of the simulation is presented.