hPIC: A scalable electrostatic Particle-in-Cell for Plasma–Material Interactions

The hPIC code is a fully-kinetic electrostatic Particle-in-Cell application targeted at large-scale simulations of Plasma–Material Interactions. The code can simulate multi-component strongly-magnetized plasmas in a region close to the wall, including the magnetic sheath and presheath, plus the first surface layers which release material impurities. The Poisson solver is based on PETSc conjugate gradient with BoomerAMG algebraic multigrid preconditioners. Scaling tests on the Blue Waters supercomputer have demonstrated excellent weak-scaling (tested up to 65,536 cores) and good strong-scaling up to 262,144 cores. In this paper, we will make an overview of the main features of the code and of the scaling performance as measured on the Blue Waters supercomputer at Illinois.