PICKSC News Archives

Announcement for OSIRIS Users and Developers Workshop

June 30, 2017 by Benjamin Winjum

The UCLA Particle-in-Cell and Kinetic Simulation Center (http://picksc.idre.ucla.edu) and the IST Extreme Plasma Physics Team in Portugal (http://epp.tecnico.ulisboa.pt) are pleased to announce the first annual OSIRIS Users and Developers Workshop. The location will alternate between UCLA and IST with the first workshop to be held at UCLA September 18-20. This meeting is open to all who have gained access to or are interested in gaining access to the OSIRIS source code and data analysis tools through an MoU between either UCLA or IST.

The goals of the workshop are:

To introduce users to the new features and design of OSIRIS 4.0.
To allow users of OSIRIS to share experiences and discuss best practices.
To identify useful test and demonstration problems.
To discuss how to transition from being a user to an active developer.
Identify areas for near term software improvements and a community strategy for carrying out the necessary development.

If you are interested in attending this workshop or in getting access to OSIRIS please contact picksc.org@gmail.com.

OSIRIS is a state-of-the-art massively parallel relativistic particle-in-cell code that is now being used by roughly 100 users worldwide through more than 25 MoUs with UCLA or IST. OSIRIS results have been featured or included in 100’s of publications in journals such as Nature, Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters, and Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Over the past 20 years, the development of OSIRIS at UCLA has been partially supported by NSF, DOE, and LLNL, and at IST has been supported by the European Research Council, the Portuguese National Science Foundation (FCT), and the European Space Agency.

UPIC 2.0.2 now public

May 18, 2017 by Benjamin Winjum

The PICKSC group has released UPIC 2.0.2, an update to the first release of UPIC (2.0.1). The major new features here are namelist inputs, a full set of field diagnostics, and initialization with non-uniform densities. As before, codes can be compiled to run with 2 levels of parallelism (MPI/OpenMP) or OpenMP only.

The primary purpose of this framework is to provide trusted components for building and customizing parallel Particle-in-Cell codes for plasma simulation. The framework provides libraries as well as reference applications illustrating their use.

The public repository is available on GitHub and may be found here: UPIC-2.0 (You must be logged onto GitHub for this links to take you to a valid site).

The files for the 2D and 3D components of UPIC 2.0.2 may also be directly downloaded here on the PICKSC site.

UPIC 2.0.1 now public

February 21, 2017 by Benjamin Winjum

The PICKSC group has released UPIC 2.0.1. The primary purpose of this framework is to provide trusted components for building and customizing parallel Particle-in-Cell codes for plasma simulation. The framework provides libraries as well as reference applications illustrating their use.

The public repository is available on GitHub and may be found here: UPIC-2.0 (You must be logged onto GitHub for this links to take you to a valid site).

The files for the 2D and 3D components of UPIC 2.0.1 may also be directly downloaded here on the PICKSC site.

QuickPIC and OSHUN now public

January 9, 2017 by Benjamin Winjum

The PICKSC group has released QuickPIC and OSHUN as open-source codes.

The public repositories are available on GitHub and may be found here: QuickPIC and OSHUN. (You must be logged onto GitHub for these links to take you to a valid site).

QuickPIC is a 3D parallel (MPI & OpenMP Hybrid) Quasi-Static PIC code, which is developed based on the framework UPIC.

OSHUN is a parallel Vlasov-Fokker-Planck plasma simulation code that employs an arbitrary-order spherical harmonic velocity-space decomposition. The public repository currently houses a 1D C++ version and a 1D pure Python version (with optional C-modules for improved performance). A 2D C++ version will be added shortly.

If you have any questions, please contact Weiming An for QuickPIC and Ben Winjum for OSHUN.

PICKSC members present at AAC

August 31, 2016 by Benjamin Winjum

PICKSC members recently attended the 17th Advanced Accelerator Concepts (AAC) Workshop held at the National Harbor in Washington DC between July 31 and August 5. Copies of the presentations have not been posted. The PI of PICKSC received the AAC prize “for his leadership and pioneering contributions to the theory and particle-in-cell simulations of plasma based acceleration”. In addition, a PICKSC visiting student from IST in Portugal, Diana Amorim, received a best poster prize for her presentation, “Transverse evolution of positron beams accelerating in hollow plasma channel non-linear wakefields.”

3D OpenMP/MPI code benchmarks

January 11, 2016 by Benjamin Winjum

Viktor Decyk has developed fully 3D versions of skeleton PIC codes illustrating the hybrid parallel algorithmic techniques for utilizing both OpenMP and MPI. These skeleton codes have recently been benchmarked on the Edison machine at NERSC.

For the electromagnetic code on a problem size of 1024^3 grids with 27 particles/cell, one can see good scaling up to nearly 100,000 cores, nearly the entire Edison machine. There are 10 FFTs per time step, and the particle time gives about 2 psec/particle/time step at 98,304 cores.

Electrostatic, electromagnetic, and Darwin versions are available. These codes may be accessed here on the OpenMP/MPI skeleton code subpage or at our GitHub repository for skeleton codes.

New video describes activities at UCLA’s Plasma Science and Technology Institute

May 22, 2015 by Benjamin Winjum

A new video has been produced that highlights activities at The Plasma Science and Technology Institute at UCLA. This Institute consists of affiliated laboratories and research groups that investigate fundamental questions related plasmas, and it includes the research activities performed by PICKSC scientists.

The areas of study include basic plasma physics, fusion research, space plasmas, laser-plasma interactions, advanced accelerators, novel radiation sources, and plasma-materials processing. Diverse programs encompass experimentation, theory, and computer simulation.

The video may be seen here.

NSF highlights plasma-accelerator PIC simulations

April 23, 2015 by Benjamin Winjum

NSF has highlighted research done by QuickPIC for the FACET simulations. See link here.

QuickPIC makes the Nature cover

April 23, 2015 by Benjamin Winjum

Breakthrough in plasma-based accelerator research is facilitated using QuickPIC, a code based on the UPIC Framework. Recently, a team of researchers from SLAC and UCLA demonstrated a milestone in plasma based accelerator research. Using two properly space electron bunches, they were able to demonstrate efficient transfer of energy from a drive electron beam to a second trailing electron beam. The planning and interpretation of the experiment relied on QuickPIC as well as OSIRIS.

Nature article: M. Litos et al., Nature 515, 92 (2014) | General science write-up in Nature News and Views: Accelerator physics: Surf’s up at SLAC | More links...

PICKSC members get INCITE award

January 1, 2015 by Benjamin Winjum

90 million processor hours on the IBM Blue Gene/Q Machine at Argonne National Laboratory have been awarded to Frank Tsung (PI), Warren Mori (Co-PI), Ben Winjum, and Viktor Decyk as a 2015 Incite Award for ““Petascale Simulations of Laser Plasma Interactions Relevant to IFE”. Read more

The Research Summary for the Award:

Inertial (laser-initiated) fusion energy (IFE) holds incredible promise as a source of clean and sustainable energy for powering devices. However, significant obstacles to obtaining and harnessing IFE in a controllable manner remain, including the fact that self-sustained ignition has not yet been achieved in IFE experiments. This inability is attributed in large part to excessive laser-plasma instabilities (LPIs) encountered by the laser beams.

LPIs such as two-plasmon decay and stimulated Raman scattering can absorb, deflect, or reflect laser light, disrupting the fusion drive, and can also generate energetic electrons that threaten to preheat the target. Nevertheless, IFE schemes like shock ignition (where a high-intensity laser is introduced toward the end of the compression pulse) could potentially take advantage of LPIs to generate energetic particles to create a useful shock that drives fusion. Therefore, developing an understanding of LPIs will be crucial to the success of any IFE scheme.

The physics involved in LPI processes is complex and highly nonlinear, involving both wave- wave and wave-particle interactions and necessitating the use of fully nonlinear kinetic computer models, such as fully explicit particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations that are computationally intensive and thus limit how many spatial and temporal scales can be modeled.

By using highly optimized PIC codes, however, researchers will focus on using fully kinetic simulations to study the key basic high energy density science directly relevant to IFE. The ultimate goal is to develop a hierarchy of kinetic, fluid, and other reduced-description approaches that can model the full space and time scales, and close the gap between particle- based simulations and current experiments.

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