This award facilitates scientific research using the large, new, computational resource named Blue Waters being developed by IBM and scheduled to be deployed at the University of Illinois. It provides travel funds to support technical coordination between the principal investigators, the Blue Waters project team and the vendor technical team.
The project team will use Blue Waters to advance the joint research goals of the UCLA Simulation of Plasmas Group and the OSIRIS Consortium. Those research goals encompass four distinct plasma physics questions which rely on simulations using particle in cell (PIC) algorithms. These algorithms are implemented in six different codes maintained by the UCLA Plasma Simulation Group and the OSIRIS Consortium. The project will bring this PIC infrastructure to Blue Waters to address four plasma physics grand challenge simulations: first 3D simulation of an assembled fast ignition target with a size of interest for fusion energy; exploration of the mechanisms of cosmic accelerators associated with relativistic collisionless shocks; simulations with the necessary spatial resolution to explore relativistically moving plasma waves as an alternative accelerating structure (to current particle accelerators); regional 3D PIC simulations capable of identifying substorm onset in the Earth magnetotail.
PIC codes are used to make scientific discoveries that impact diverse fields with significant societal impact such as high-energy physics, fusion energy, and reliability of communication satellites. The proposed research also has much synergy with the new Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE). This will allow results to broadly impact research and education at UCLA.
Computer simulations on unique facilities such as Blue Waters enable transformative simulations that could lead to important scientific discoveries. This project was aimed at ensuring that particle-in-cell codes can effectively run on a single processing core on Blue Waters and can scale to the full size of the machine. In addition, the goal was to use Blue Waters to begin to tackle compelling questions within the fields of inertial confinement fusion, plasma based acceleration, and space weather. One outcome of this project the state-of-the-art particle-in-cell codes OSIRIS and QuickPIC now can effectively utilize the full Blue Waters machine. For example, OSIRIS sustained a speed of 2.2 Petaflops (2.2 x 1015 floating point operations per second) on over 750,000 Blue Waters cores. OSIRIS and QuickPIC were used to study key physics concerning how to make ultra-compact accelerators based on plasma wave wakes and on the intricacies of how a laser propagates hot dense plasmas as occurs at the National Ignition Facility or may occur in future inertial confinement fusion experiments. Outcomes from these simulations have already been published and several more publications have been submitted or are in preparation. Based on some Blue Waters simulations, we are working on developing designs for a linear collider at the energy frontier and a next generation light source based on electron acceleration in nonlinear plasma waves. An example of an OSIRIS simulation on Blue Waters is attached. The simulation provided an explanation for an interesting observation in recent experiments in which the electron beam coming out of a compact laser driven plasma wakefield accelerator is the from of a ring.
