PIConGPU - Ultrafast OpenSource Plasma Physics

PIConGPU is a fully relativistic 3D3V particle-in-cell (PIC) code for studing laser-plasma physics. Todays GPUs can be used as hardware accelerators, approaching a new era of fast in situ plasma simulations.

PIC codes became the working-horses for theoretical studies of laser-plasma interactions. PIConGPU has been developed for ion and electron acceleration experiments as well as for studing plasma instabilities. It is accompanied by a still-growing set of live-analysis plugins, e.g. far-field radiation diagnostics and live 3D imaging.

With its outstanding performance up to 8 PFlops/s on the TOP2 supercomputer Titan (Oak Ridge National Lab), PIConGPU is one of the Gordon-Bell-Prize finalists 2013. It has been shown that it runs efficiently on up to 18,000 GPUs, utilizing a total of 50 million multi-processors.

Its OpenSource development is carried out by the Junior Group Computational Radiation Physics at the Institute for Radiation Physics at HZDR in close collaboration with the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) of the Technical University Dresden (TUD).