Three dimensional particle-in-cell laser-plasma simulation is an important area of computational physics. Solving state-of-the-art problems requires large-scale simulation on a supercomputer using specialized codes. A growing demand in computational resources inspires research in improving efficiency and co-design for supercomputers based on many-core architectures. This paper presents first performance results of the particle-in-cell plasma simulation code PICADOR on the recently introduced Knights Landing generation of Intel Xeon Phi. A straightforward rebuilding of the code yields a 2.43 x speedup compared to the previous Knights Corner generation. Further code optimization results in an additional 1.89 x speedup. The optimization performed is beneficial not only for Knights Landing, but also for high-end CPUs and Knights Corner. The optimized version achieves 100 GFLOPS double precision performance on a Knights Landing device with the speedups of 2.35 x compared to a 14-core Haswell CPU and 3.47 x compared to a 61-core Knights Corner Xeon Phi.
@article{arxiv.1608.01009,
title = {Co-design of a particle-in-cell plasma simulation code for Intel Xeon Phi: a first look at Knights Landing},
author = {Igor Surmin and Sergey Bastrakov and Zakhar Matveev and Evgeny Efimenko and Arkady Gonoskov and Iosif Meyerov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.01009},
year = {2016}
}