WarpX on Frontier with In Situ Visualization
- Science Problem
- The Exascale Modeling of Advanced Particle Accelerators (WarpX) project aims to answer outstanding questions in the physics of acceleration and transport of particle beams in chains of plasma accelerators.
- The large scale of simulations required to resolve features necessitates in situ processing of the data.
- Technical Solution
- A 4.6 billion element simulation ran across 4416 GPUs on 552 nodes on the Frontier supercomputer at OLCF.
- The simulation application used HIP to run on the GPUs and passed device pointer to Ascent, providing zero-copy in situ processing of the time-varying data.
- Ascent leveraged RAJA to create derived fields and VTK-m to run visualization algorithms on the GPUs.
- Science Impact
- Detailed simulations are critical in predicting particle behavior in laser wakefields in plasma-based particle accelerators.
Visualization of a staged laser-plasma accelerator simulation. Shown is the strong traversal focusing fields (red-blue) in the first plasma stage (gray) and injected into this structure is an electron beam (orange-green) that is accelerated to the right to high energies.
- This simulation forms the precursor of even more realistic electron beams and plasma stage parameters.
- Such key “ground truth” simulations, 3D from first principles in ultra-high fidelity, are the first-of-their-kind.