%0 Journal Article
%T Implementation of a Particle Accelerator Beam Dynamics Code on Multi-Node GPUs
%A Zhicong Liu
%A Ji Qiang
%J Journal of Software Engineering and Applications
%P 321-338
%@ 1945-3124
%D 2019
%I Scientific Research Publishing
%R 10.4236/jsea.2019.129020
%X Particle accelerators play an important role in a wide range of scientific discoveries and industrial applications. The self-consistent multi-particle simulation based on the particle-in-cell (PIC) method has been used to study charged particle beam dynamics inside those accelerators. However, the PIC simulation is time-consuming and needs to use modern parallel computers for high-resolution applications. In this paper, we implemented a parallel beam dynamics PIC code on multi-node hybrid architecture computers with multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We used two methods to parallelize the PIC code on multiple GPUs and observed that the replication method is a better choice for moderate problem size and current computer hardware while the domain decomposition method might be a better choice for large problem size and more advanced computer hardware that allows direct communications among multiple GPUs. Using the multi-node hybrid architectures at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), the optimized GPU PIC code achieves a reasonable parallel performance and scales up to 64 GPUs with 16 million particles.
%K Particle Accelerator
%K Particle-In-Cell
%K GPU
%K Parallel Beam Dynamics Simulation
%U http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=94837