Accelerating the numerical simulation of magnetic field lines in tokamaks using the GPU

► Tokamak magnetic field lines are simulated on a GPU. ► Numerical integration of a set of nonlinear differential equations is required. ► Using the GPU yields a significant reduction in processing time compared to the CPU. ► Computational runs that took days now take hours. ► These gains have been...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Fusion engineering and design Vol. 86; no. 4; pp. 399 - 406
Main Authors:	Kalling, R.C., Evans, T.E., Orlov, D.M., Schissel, D.P., R.Maingi, Menard, J.E., Sabbagh, S.A.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01-06-2011 Elsevier
Subjects:	70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY Applied sciences Computation COMPUTER CODES Computer simulation Controled nuclear fusion plants DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS Energy Energy. Thermal use of fuels Exact sciences and technology Expenses FLEXIBILITY FORTRAN General-purpose computation on graphical processing units Graphical processing unit IMPLEMENTATION Installations for energy generation and conversion: thermal and electrical energy MAGNETIC FIELDS MAGNETIC ISLANDS Mathematical models Non-axisymmetric magnetic perturbations Nonlinearity NSTX PLASMA INSTABILITY Reduction SIMULATION Stochastic magnetic field lines Tokamaks General-purpose computation on graphical processing units Stochastic magnetic field lines Tokamaks Graphical processing unit NSTX Non-axisymmetric magnetic perturbations Tokamak Plasma Differential equation Nuclear fusion reactor Instability Numerical simulation Magnetic field
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Summary:	► Tokamak magnetic field lines are simulated on a GPU. ► Numerical integration of a set of nonlinear differential equations is required. ► Using the GPU yields a significant reduction in processing time compared to the CPU. ► Computational runs that took days now take hours. ► These gains have been accomplished without significant hardware expense. trip3d is a field line simulation code that numerically integrates a set of nonlinear magnetic field line differential equations. The code is used to study properties of magnetic islands and stochastic or chaotic field line topologies that are important for designing non-axisymmetric magnetic perturbation coils for controlling plasma instabilities in future machines. The code is very computationally intensive and for large runs can take on the order of days to complete on a traditional single CPU. This work describes how the code was converted from Fortran to C and then restructured to take advantage of GPU computing using NVIDIA's CUDA. The reduction in computing time has been dramatic where runs that previously took days now take hours allowing a scale of problem to be examined that would previously not have been attempted. These gains have been accomplished without significant hardware expense. Performance, correctness, code flexibility, and implementation time have been analyzed to gauge the success and applicability of these methods when compared to the traditional multi-CPU approach.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 DE-AC05-00OR22725 USDOE Office of Science (SC)
ISSN:	0920-3796 1873-7196
DOI:	10.1016/j.fusengdes.2011.03.064