PPPL-3869 is available in pdf format (636 KB).

Porting the 3D Gyrokinetic Particle-in-cell Code GTC to the CRAY/NEC SX-6 Vector Architecture: Perspectives and Challenges

Authors: S. Ethier and Z. Lin

Date of PPPL Report: September 2003

Presented at: the 18th International Conference on Numerical Simulation of Plasmas (ICNSP '03), 7-10 September 2003, Cape Code, Massachusetts.

Several years of optimization on the super-scalar architecture has made it more difficult to port the current version of the 3D particle-in-cell code GTC to the CRAY/NEC SX-6 vector architecture. This paper explains the initial work that has been done to port this code to the SX-6 computer and to optimize the most time consuming parts. Early performance results are shown and compared to the same test done on the IBM SP Power 3 and Power 4 machines.