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

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.