English

High-Performance Resilient Multi-GPU Hybrid Particle-in-Cell Monte Carlo Simulations at Scale

Plasma Physics 2026-06-26 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Performance Computational Physics

Abstract

The increasing demand for high-performance computing in plasma physics has driven scalable and resilient simulation methods capable of efficiently exploiting modern multi-GPU architectures. This work extends a portable hybrid MPI+OpenMP implementation of BIT1, focusing on high-performance resilience for accelerated Particle-in-Cell (PIC) Monte Carlo (MC) simulations under both uniform and non-uniform load conditions. Scalable particle load balancing and robust checkpoint/restart mechanisms across Nvidia and AMD accelerators are integrated with standardized I/O using openPMD and ADIOS2. This leverages BP4 for high-performance file-based checkpointing and SST for in-memory data streaming, enabling efficient data movement, resilient large-scale execution, seamless continuation from existing checkpoints, and effective handling of computational and I/O workloads. Advanced HPC profiling and tracing tools, including Nvidia Nsight Systems and AMD ROC-Profiler with Perfetto, provide detailed insights into computation, communication, and system-level behavior for optimization. Performance results on Frontier (OLCF-5), MN5, and LUMI-G demonstrate strong and weak scaling up to 800 GPUs, validating the framework for large-scale PIC MC simulations, while in-situ analysis and visualization using scalable I/O further enhance scientific insight without interrupting multi-GPU execution on current and future exascale systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.28534,
  title  = {High-Performance Resilient Multi-GPU Hybrid Particle-in-Cell Monte Carlo Simulations at Scale},
  author = {Jeremy J. Williams and Stefan Costea and David Tskhakaya and Leon Kos and Ales Podolnik and Jakub Hromadka and Jordy Trilaksono and Yi Ju and Kallia Chronaki and Evangelos Gkolantas and Vassilis Papaefstathiou and Allen D. Malony and Sameer Shende and Frank Jenko and Erwin Laure and Stefano Markidis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.28534},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted by the Euro-Par 2026 workshops (BIGHPC 2026), prepared in the standardized Springer LNCS format and consists of 12 pages, which includes the main text, references, and figures