Benjamin Winjum, Author at PICKSC

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.

Whistler anisotropy instability study uses PICKSC skeleton code

March 14, 2017 by Benjamin Winjum

A new article in the Journal of Geophysical Space Research: Space Physics utilized simulations with the 2D darwin OpenMP skeleton code:

An, X., C. Yue, J. Bortnik, V. Decyk, W. Li, R. M. Thorne (2017), On the parameter dependence of the whistler anisotropy instability, J. Geophy. Res. Space Physics, 122, DOI:10.1002/2017JA023895

The evolution of the whistler anisotropy instability relevant to whistler-mode chorus waves in the Earth’s inner magnetosphere was studied using kinetic simulations with mdpic2 and compared with satellite observations.

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.”

Publication uses PICKSC skeleton code

April 30, 2016 by Benjamin Winjum

The first publication based on the skeleton codes recently appeared in Physics of Plasmas:

R. Scott Hughes, Joseph Wang, Viktor K. Decyk, and S. Peter Gary, “Effects of
variations in electron thermal velocity on the whistler anisotropy instability: Particle-in-
cell simulations,” Physics of Plasmas 23, 042106 (2016). DOI: 10.1063/1.4945748

This work made used of the 2D darwin code mdpic2 and studied whistler wave instabilities for solar wind parameters.

New 3D Skeleton Codes

January 29, 2016 by Benjamin Winjum

PICKSC researcher Viktor Decyk has developed several 3D skeleton codes which utilize and illustrate MPI and OpenMP/MPI techniques in fully 3D PIC codes. These codes include electrostatic, electromagnetic, and Darwin versions.

The codes are now available under Software for public use.

New Python Skeleton Code

January 29, 2016 by Benjamin Winjum

PICKSC graduate student Thamine Dalichaouch has written a skeleton code in Python. This code is a 2D electrostatic serial PIC code and mirrors the 2D serial skeleton code pic2.

python_pic2 will soon be available on the PICKSC site.

New Coarray Fortran Skeleton Code

January 25, 2016 by Benjamin Winjum

Alessandro Fanfarillo and Damian Rouson from Italy have translated the PICKSC skeleton code ppic2 to utilize Coarray Fortran. Coarray Fortran enables a programmer to write parallel programs using a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) scheme. It is part of the Fortran2008 standard and provides an alternative to the dominant Message-Passing Interface (MPI) paradigm.

The code ppic2_caf is available here on the PICKSC site.