Minute-Scale High-Fidelity Gyrokinetic Simulations with Portability from Laptop to Supercomputer

Abstract

Global gyrokinetic particle simulations remain computationally expensive, as they demand both adequate marker statistics and three-dimensional field solvers. In this work, we present a hybrid spectral method within the particle-in-Fourier (PIF) framework and implement it in the electrostatic model of GTC. Charge scatter and field gather are performed between particles and fields on a two-dimensional poloidal mesh, while the corresponding Poisson solver is discretized using radial finite differences and poloidal m-harmonics. Truncated spectral transforms are employed to connect multiple representations for fields, avoiding costly particle-grid operations for each individual m-harmonic within the particle loop. Benchmarks against conventional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations successfully reproduce single-n ion temperature gradient (ITG) mode structures and dispersion relations, as well as multi-n nonlinear ITG transport and its regulation by zonal flows. Compared to conventional PIC, the proposed method reduces the effective problem size by more than a factor of 48 and achieves a speedup of over two orders of magnitude for single-n cases. A 2000-step single-n simulation with approximately 2 million markers completes in 78.2 seconds on a laptop GPU, while multi-n turbulence simulation also completes within minutes. Furthermore, the elimination of toroidal particle-shift communication yields promising preliminary scaling performance on multiple NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The numerical scheme is broadly applicable for accelerating particle simulations on platforms ranging from laptops to supercomputers.

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BibTeX RIS

BibTeX

@misc{bao2026minutescale,
  title = {{Minute-Scale High-Fidelity Gyrokinetic Simulations with Portability from Laptop to Supercomputer}},
  author = {Jian Bao and Huasheng Xie and Ming Yang and Zhixin Lu and Haotian Chen and Zhihong Lin and Feng Zhang},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.03354},
  eprint = {2609.03354},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03354},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}

RIS

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Minute-Scale High-Fidelity Gyrokinetic Simulations with Portability from Laptop to Supercomputer
AU  - Jian Bao
AU  - Huasheng Xie
AU  - Ming Yang
AU  - Zhixin Lu
AU  - Haotian Chen
AU  - Zhihong Lin
AU  - Feng Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/03
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.03354
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03354
AB  - Global gyrokinetic particle simulations remain computationally expensive, as they demand both adequate marker statistics and three-dimensional field solvers. In this work, we present a hybrid spectral method within the particle-in-Fourier (PIF) framework and implement it in the electrostatic model of GTC. Charge scatter and field gather are performed between particles and fields on a two-dimensional poloidal mesh, while the corresponding Poisson solver is discretized using radial finite differences and poloidal m-harmonics. Truncated spectral transforms are employed to connect multiple representations for fields, avoiding costly particle-grid operations for each individual m-harmonic within the particle loop. Benchmarks against conventional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations successfully reproduce single-n ion temperature gradient (ITG) mode structures and dispersion relations, as well as multi-n nonlinear ITG transport and its regulation by zonal flows. Compared to conventional PIC, the proposed method reduces the effective problem size by more than a factor of 48 and achieves a speedup of over two orders of magnitude for single-n cases. A 2000-step single-n simulation with approximately 2 million markers completes in 78.2 seconds on a laptop GPU, while multi-n turbulence simulation also completes within minutes. Furthermore, the elimination of toroidal particle-shift communication yields promising preliminary scaling performance on multiple NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The numerical scheme is broadly applicable for accelerating particle simulations on platforms ranging from laptops to supercomputers.
ER  -

Abstract

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