HPSF Conference 2025

The Vlasov-Maxwell system, which describes the motion for charged particles of matter in a plasma state using a particle distribution function, is based on a 6-D phase space defined through configuration and velocity coordinates.
Considering an Eulerian grid for this system with only 32^6 degrees of freedom, the distribution function requires already 8.5 GB of memory. This implies that high-resolution simulations can only be executed on large compute clusters.
In this talk, we focus on two aspects of the open-source code BSL6D to solve a reduced version of the Vlasov-Maxwell system. The shared memory parallelization based on Kokkos applies a stencil algorithm to data, which is non-contiguous in memory, to reduce memory requirements. The inter-node communication bottleneck poses a challenge due to the large halo domain to compute domain ratio. Finally, we discuss the advantages of RAII-managed MPI communicators for distributed domains, simplifying the implementation of parallel algorithms with distributed memory concepts.