PICKSC researchers have been updating our software to take full advantage of the many-core Intel Knight’s Landing (KNL) nodes.

An OpenMP 3D electrostatic code from UPIC 2.0 has achieved a performance of 850 psec/particle-step on a single Intel KNL node. On a large memory KNL such as the 96 GB node on the Cori machine at NERSC, a PIC simulation with a billion particles will run in about one second per time step.

A new branch of QuickPIC (described here) has also been compiled and run on Cori at NERSC. On a single KNL node with 68 threads, the total time spent on one particle per step is 3.82 ns (including 1 iteration).