Bigger, Better, Uncut - On New Accelerator Concepts And Next-Generation HPC Simulations at HZDR

The German national labs in the Helmholtz Association push the development of alternative acceleration schemes in large scale programs to overcome the limits set by conventional accelerators. Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden - Rossendorf (HZDR) hosts high-power (PW), ultra-short (fs), high-repetition rate (Hz) lasers that are capable to pave the way to provide reliable, controlled laser-plasma sources.

Besides improving ion plasma-accelerators with techniques such as enhanced TNSA, cone targets and mass reduced targets, experiments successfully conducted at HZDR include new light sources from heads-on Thomson scattering with the synchronized linear accelerator ELBE and laser-wakefield electron acceleration. Upcoming large-scale international experiments such as solid-target, pump-probe science in strong-fields at the European XFEL (HIBEF) are coordinated by HZDR, uniting more than 350 scientists and 300 PhD students from 16 countries.

In the highly non-linear domain of plasma-based accelerators, many challenges today occur due to the missing control over arising instabilities, neglected effects in theoretical plasma models or strongly varying experimental parameters such as the driving laser pulses. In the same way as experiments evolve from best-shot practices, simulations have to evolve to full-scale, multi-physics parameter studies including extensive in-situ diagnostics. As shown in
this talk, even interactive live simulations on the biggest clusters of the US and Europe are possible today to drive exploration.

PIConGPU is a fully relativistic 3D3V particle-in-cell (PIC) code for studying laser-plasma interactions. Today's graphics processing units (GPUs) are massively-parallel accelerators for scientific computing, pushing the limits for a new era of in-situ plasma simulations. HZDR drives its development in an open source community effort, providing the horsepower that is required to approach the foremost mentioned challenges.