English

High-performance orbit-following code ASCOT5 for Monte Carlo simulations in fusion plasmas

Plasma Physics 2019-08-08 v1

Abstract

We present a novel implementation of a Monte Carlo particle-following code for solving the distribution function of minority species in fusion plasmas, called ASCOT5, and verify it using theoretical results for neoclassical transport. The code has been developed from ground up with an OpenMP-MPI hybrid paradigm to take full advantage of current and next generation many-core CPUs with multithreading and SIMD operations. Up to 6-fold increase in performance is demonstrated compared to a previous version of the code which only utilizes MPI. The physics model of the code is comprehensively validated against existing theoretical work, and it is shown to faithfully reproduce neoclassical diffusion across three different collisionality regimes. In simulations for realistic tokamak plasmas, including complex non-axisymmetric geometry, ASCOT5 is verified to reproduce results from the previous version ASCOT4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.02482,
  title  = {High-performance orbit-following code ASCOT5 for Monte Carlo simulations in fusion plasmas},
  author = {Jari Varje and Konsta Särkimäki and Joona Kontula and Patrik Ollus and Taina Kurki-Suonio and Antti Snicker and Eero Hirvijoki and Simppa Äkäslompolo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.02482},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Draft to be used for reference. Subject to minor edits before submitting to a journal

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:41:46.478Z