Efficient simulation of complex plasma dynamics is crucial for advancing fusion energy research. Particle-in-Cell (PIC) Monte Carlo (MC) simulations provide insights into plasma behavior, including turbulence and confinement, which are essential for optimizing fusion reactor performance. Transitioning to exascale simulations introduces significant challenges, with traditional file input/output (I/O) inefficiencies remaining a key bottleneck. This work advances BIT1, an electrostatic PIC MC code, by improving the particle mover with OpenMP task-based parallelism, integrating openPMD’s streaming API, and enabling in-memory data streaming with the ADIOS2 Sustainable Staging Transport (SST) engine to enhance I/O performance, computational efficiency, and system storage utilization. We employ profiling tools such as gprof, perf, IPM and Darshan, which provide insights into computation, communication, and I/O operations. We implement time-dependent data checkpointing with the openPMD API enabling seamless data movement and in-situ visualization for real-time analysis without interrupting the simulation. We demonstrate improvements in simulation runtime, data accessibility and real-time insights by comparing traditional file I/O with the ADIOS2 BP4 and SST backends. The proposed hybrid BIT1 openPMD SST enhancement introduces a new paradigm for real-time scientific discovery in plasma simulations, enabling faster insights and more efficient use of exascale computing resources.

Understanding plasma instabilities is essential for achieving sustainable fusion energy, with large-scale plasma simulations playing a crucial role in both the design and development of next-generation fusion energy devices and the modelling of industrial plasmas. To achieve sustainable fusion energy, it is essential to accurately model and predict plasma behavior under extreme conditions, requiring sophisticated simulation codes capable of capturing the complex interaction between plasma dynamics, magnetic fields, and material surfaces. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive HPC analysis of two prominent plasma simulation codes, BIT1 and JOREK, to advance understanding of plasma behavior in fusion energy applications. Our focus is on evaluating JOREK's computational efficiency and scalability for simulating non-linear MHD phenomena in tokamak fusion devices. The motivation behind this work stems from the urgent need to advance our understanding of plasma instabilities in magnetically confined fusion devices. Enhancing JOREK's performance on supercomputers improves fusion plasma code predictability, enabling more accurate modelling and faster optimization of fusion designs, thereby contributing to sustainable fusion energy. In prior studies, we analysed BIT1, a massively parallel Particle-in-Cell (PIC) code for studying plasma-material interactions in fusion devices. Our investigations into BIT1's computational requirements and scalability on advanced supercomputing architectures yielded valuable insights. Through detailed profiling and performance analysis, we have identified the primary bottlenecks and implemented optimization strategies, significantly enhancing parallel performance. This previous work serves as a foundation for our present endeavours.

We detail our developments in the high-fidelity spectral-element code Neko that are essential for unprecedented large-scale direct numerical simulations of fully developed turbulence. Major inno- vations are modular multi-backend design enabling performance portability across a wide range of GPUs and CPUs, a GPU-optimized preconditioner with task overlapping for the pressure-Poisson equation and in-situ data compression. We carry out initial runs of Rayleigh–Bénard Convection (RBC) at extreme scale on the LUMI and Leonardo supercomputers. We show how Neko is able to strongly scale to 16,384 GPUs and obtain results that are not pos- sible without careful consideration and optimization of the entire simulation workflow. These developments in Neko will help resolv- ing the long-standing question regarding the ultimate regime in RBC. 

In-situ visualization on HPC systems allows us to analyze simulation results that would otherwise be impossible, given the size of the simulation data sets and offline post-processing execution time. We design and develop in-situ visualization with Paraview Catalyst in Nek5000, a massively parallel Fortran and C code for computational fluid dynamics applications. We perform strong scalability tests up to 2,048 cores on KTH's Beskow Cray XC40 supercomputer and assess in-situ visualization's impact on the Nek5000 performance. In our study case, a high-fidelity simulation of turbulent flow, we observe that in-situ operations significantly limit the strong scalability of the code, reducing the relative parallel efficiency to only ~21\% on 2,048 cores (the relative efficiency of Nek5000 without in-situ operations is ~99\%). Through profiling with Arm MAP, we identified a bottleneck in the image composition step (that uses Radix-kr algorithm) where a majority of the time is spent on MPI communication. We also identified an imbalance of in-situ processing time between rank 0 and all other ranks. Better scaling and load-balancing in the parallel image composition would considerably improve the performance and scalability of Nek5000 with in-situ capabilities in large-scale simulation.

AllScale is a programming environment targeting simplified development of highly scalable parallel applications by dividing development responsibilities into silos. The front-end AllScale API provides a simple C++ development environment through a suite of parallel constructs expressions denoting tasks operating concurrently. This interfaces with the other components of the toolchain (core-level API, compiler and runtime) which manages tasks related to the machine and system level, hidden to the user. The paper describes the development of two large-scale parallel applications within the AllScale API, namely, an advection– diffusion model with data assimilation and a Lagrangian space-weather simulation model based on a particle-in-cell method. We present mathematical formulations and implementations and evaluate parallel constructs developed using the AllScale API. The performance of the applications from the perspective of both parallel scalability, and more importantly productivity are assessed. We demonstrate how the AllScale API can greatly improve developer productivity while maintaining parallel performance in two applications with distinct numerical characteristics. Code complexity metrics demonstrate reduction in application specific implementations of up to 30% while performance tests on three different compute systems demonstrate comparable parallel scalability to an MPI version of the code.

GPU-accelerated computing is becoming a popular technology due to the emergence of techniques such as OpenACC, which makes it easy to port codes in their original form to GPU systems using compiler directives, and thereby speeding up computation times relatively simply. In this study we have developed an OpenACC implementation of the high order finite difference CFD solver ESSENSE for simulating compressible flows. The solver is based on summation-by-part form difference operators, and the boundary and interface conditions are weakly implemented using simultaneous approximation terms. This case study focuses on porting code to GPUs for the most time-consuming parts namely sparse matrix vector multiplications and the evaluations of fluxes. The resulting OpenACC implementation is used to simulate the Taylor-Green vortex which produces a maximum speed-up of 61.3 on a single V100 GPU by compared to serial CPU version.

Background: Identifying and assessing ligand-target binding is a core component in early drug discovery as one or more unwanted interactions may be associated with safety issues. Contributions: We present an open-source, extendable web service for predicting target profiles with confidence using machine learning for a panel of 7 targets, where models are trained on molecular docking scores from a large virtual library. The method uses conformal prediction to produce valid measures of prediction efficiency for a particular confidence level. The service also offers the possibility to dock chemical structures to the panel of targets with QuickVina on individual compound basis. Results: The docking procedure and resulting models were validated by docking well-known inhibitors for each of the 7 targets using QuickVina. The model predictions showed comparable performance to molecular docking scores against an external validation set. The implementation as publicly available microservices on Kubernetes ensures resilience, scalability, and extensibility.

The expected high levels of parallelism together with the heterogeneity and complexity of new computing systems pose many challenges to current software. New programming approaches and runtime systems that can simplify the development of parallel applications are needed. Task-based runtime systems have emerged as a good solution to cope with high levels of parallelism, while providing software portability, and easing program development. However, these runtime systems require real-time information on the state of the system to properly orchestrate program execution and optimise resource utilisation. In this paper, we present a lightweight monitoring infrastructure developed within the AllScale Runtime System, a task-based runtime system for extreme scale. This monitoring component provides real-time introspection capabilities that help the runtime scheduler in its decision-making process and adaptation, while introducing minimum overhead. In addition, the monitoring component provides several post-mortem reports as well as real-time data visualisation that can be of great help in the task of performance debugging.

In this work, we consider the integration of MPI one-sided communication and non-blocking I/O in HPC-centric MapReduce frameworks. Using a decoupled strategy, we aim to overlap the Map and Reduce phases of the algorithm by allowing processes to communicate and synchronize using solely one-sided operations. Hence, we effectively increase the performance in situations where the workload per process becomes unexpectedly unbalanced. Using a Word-Count implementation and a large dataset from the Purdue MapReduce Benchmarks Suite (PUMA), we demonstrate that our approach can provide up to 23% performance improvement on average compared to a reference MapReduce implementation that uses state-of-the-art MPI collective communication and I/O.