Implementation of a Particle Accelerator Beam Dynamics Code on Multi-Node GPUs

• 作者: Ji Qiang Zhicong Liu
• 来源期刊: 软件工程与应用(英文)
• 学科: 医学
• 关键词: PARTICLE ACCELERATOR PARTICLE-IN-CELL GPU Parallel BEAM Dynamics Simulation
• 年，卷（期）: 2019,（9）
• 页码范围: 321-338
• 页数: 18页
• 分类号: R73

摘要

Particle accelerators play an important role in a wide range of scientific discoveries and industrial applications. The self-consistent multi-particle simulation based on the particle-in-cell (PIC) method has been used to study charged particle beam dynamics inside those accelerators. However, the PIC simulation is time-consuming and needs to use modern parallel computers for high-resolution applications. In this paper, we implemented a parallel beam dynamics PIC code on multi-node hybrid architecture computers with multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We used two methods to parallelize the PIC code on multiple GPUs and observed that the replication method is a better choice for moderate problem size and current computer hardware while the domain decomposition method might be a better choice for large problem size and more advanced computer hardware that allows direct communications among multiple GPUs. Using the multi-node hybrid architectures at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), the optimized GPU PIC code achieves a reasonable parallel performance and scales up to 64 GPUs with 16 million particles.