PIConGPU: A fully relativistic particle-in-cell code for a GPU cluster.

The particle-in-cell algorithm (PIC) is one of the most widely used algorithms in computational plasma physics. With the advent of graphical processing units (GPUs) large-scale plasma simulations on inexpensive GPU clusters are in reach. We present an implementation of a fully relativistic plasma PIC algorithm for GPUs based on the NVIDIA CUDA library. It supports a hybrid architecture consisting of single computation nodes interconnected in a standard cluster topology, each node carrying one or more GPUs. The inter-node communication is realized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The simulation code PIConGPU presented in this work is to our knowledge the first scalable GPU cluster implementation of the PIC algorithm in plasma physics.