Axel Huebl

Radiative signatures of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability

We present a particle-in-cell simulation of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI) that for the first time delivers angularly resolved radiation spectra of the particle dynamics during the formation of the KHI. This enables studying the formation of the KHI with unprecedented spatial, angular and spectral resolution. Our results are of great importance for understanding astrophysical jet formation and comparable plasma phenomena by relating the particle motion observed in the KHI to its radiation signature. The innovative methods presented here on the implementation of the particle-in-cell algorithm on graphic processing units can be directly adapted to any many-core parallelization of the particle-mesh method. With these methods we see a peak performance of 7.176 PFLOP/s (double-precision) plus 1.449 PFLOP/s (single-precision), an efficiency of 96% when weakly scaling from 1 to 18432 nodes, an efficiency of 68.92% and a speed up of 794 (ideal: 1152) when strongly scaling from 16 to 18432 nodes.

Efficient laser-driven proton acceleration from cylindrical and planar cryogenic hydrogen jets

We report on recent experimental results deploying a continuous cryogenic hydrogen jet as a debris-free, renewable laser-driven source of pure proton beams generated at the 150 TW ultrashort pulse laser Draco. Efficient proton acceleration reaching cut-off energies of up to 20 MeV with particle numbers exceeding 109 particles per MeV per steradian is demonstrated, showing for the first time that the acceleration performance is comparable to solid foil targets with thicknesses in the micrometer range. Two different target geometries are presented and their proton beam deliverance characterized: cylindrical (∅ 5 μm) and planar (20 μm × 2 μm). In both cases typical Target Normal Sheath Acceleration emission patterns with exponential proton energy spectra are detected. Significantly higher proton numbers in laser-forward direction are observed when deploying the planar jet as compared to the cylindrical jet case. This is confirmed by two-dimensional Particle-in-Cell (2D3V PIC) simulations, which demonstrate that the planar jet proves favorable as its geometry leads to more optimized acceleration conditions.

First results with the novel petawatt laser acceleration facility in Dresden

We report on first commissioning results of the DRACO Petawatt ultra-short pulse laser system implemented at the ELBE center for high power radiation sources of Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. Key parameters of the laser system essential for efficient and reproducible performance of plasma accelerators are presented and discussed with the demonstration of 40 MeV proton acceleration under TNSA conditions as well as peaked electron spectra with unprecedented bunch charge in the 0.5 nC range.

Alpaka -- An Abstraction Library for Parallel Kernel Acceleration

Porting applications to new hardware or programming models is a tedious and error prone process. Every help that eases these burdens is saving developer time that can then be invested into the advancement of the application itself instead of preserving the status-quo on a new platform. The Alpaka library defines and implements an abstract hierarchical redundant parallelism model. The model exploits parallelism and memory hierarchies on a node at all levels available in current hardware. By doing so, it allows to achieve platform and performance portability across various types of accelerators by ignoring specific unsupported levels and utilizing only the ones supported on a specific accelerator. All hardware types (multi-and many-core CPUs, GPUs and other accelerators) are supported for and can be programmed in the same way. The Alpaka C++ template interface allows for straightforward extension of the library to support other accelerators and specialization of its internals for optimization. Running Alpaka applications on a new (and supported) platform requires the change of only one source code line instead of a lot of #ifdefs.

Demonstration of a beam loaded nanocoulomb-class laser wakefield accelerator

Laser-plasma wakefield accelerators have seen tremendous progress, now capable of producing quasi-monoenergetic electron beams in the GeV energy range with few-femtoseconds bunch duration. Scaling these accelerators to the nanocoulomb range would yield hundreds of kiloamperes peak current and stimulate the next generation of radiation sources covering high-field THz, high-brightness X-ray and γ-ray sources, compact free-electron lasers and laboratory-size beam-driven plasma accelerators. However, accelerators generating such currents operate in the beam loading regime where the accelerating field is strongly modified by the self-fields of the injected bunch, potentially deteriorating key beam parameters. Here we demonstrate that, if appropriately controlled, the beam loading effect can be employed to improve the accelerator’s performance. Self-truncated ionization injection enables loading of unprecedented charges of ∼0.5 nC within a mono-energetic peak. As the energy balance is reached, we show that the accelerator operates at the theoretically predicted optimal loading condition and the final energy spread is minimized.Higher beam quality and stability are desired in laser-plasma accelerators for their applications in compact light sources. Here the authors demonstrate in laser plasma wakefield electron acceleration that the beam loading effect can be employed to improve beam quality by controlling the beam charge.

Performance-Portable Many-Core Plasma Simulations: Porting PIConGPU to OpenPower and Beyond

With the appearance of the heterogeneous platform OpenPower,many-core accelerator devices have been coupled with Power host processors for the first time. Towards utilizing their full potential, it is worth investigating performance portable algorithms that allow to choose the best-fitting hardware for each domain-specific compute task. Suiting even the high level of parallelism on modern GPGPUs, our presented approach relies heavily on abstract meta-programming techniques, which are essential to focus on fine-grained tuning rather than code porting. With this in mind, the CUDA-based open-source plasma simulation code PIConGPU is currently being abstracted to support the heterogeneous OpenPower platform using our fast porting interface cupla, which wraps the abstract parallel C++11 kernel acceleration library Alpaka. We demonstrate how PIConGPU can benefit from the tunable kernel execution strategies of the Alpaka library, achieving portability and performance with single-source kernels on conventional CPUs, Power8 CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.

Identifying the linear phase of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and measuring its growth rate via radiation

For the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), which occurs at shear interfaces between two plasma streams, we report results on the polarized radiation over all observation directions and frequencies emitted by the plasma electrons from ab initio kinetic simulations. We find the polarization of the radiation to provide a clear signature for distinguishing the linear phase of the KHI from its other phases. During the linear phase, we predict the growth rate of the KHI radiation power to match the growth rate of the KHI to a high degree. Our predictions are based on a model of the vortex dynamics, which describes the electron motion in the vicinity of the shear interface between the two streams. Albeit the complex and turbulent dynamics happening in the shear region, we find excellent agreement between our model and large-scale particle-in-cell simulations. Our findings pave the way for identifying the KHI linear regime and for measuring its growth rate in astrophysical jets observable on earth as well as in laboratory plasmas.

Visualizing the Radiation of the Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability

Emerging new technologies in plasma simulations allow tracking billions of particles while computing their radiative spectra. We present a visualization of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability from a simulation performed with the fully-relativistic particle-in-cell code PIConGPU powered by 18,000 GPUs on the USAs fastest supercomputer Titan.

Quantitatively consistent computation of coherent and incoherent radiation in particle-in-cell codes—A general form factor formalism for macro-particles

Abstract Quantitative predictions from synthetic radiation diagnostics often have to consider all accelerated particles. For particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, this not only means including all macro-particles but also taking into account the discrete electron distribution associated with them. This paper presents a general form factor formalism that allows to determine the radiation from this discrete electron distribution in order to compute the coherent and incoherent radiation self-consistently. Furthermore, we discuss a memory-efficient implementation that allows PIC simulations with billions of macro-particles. The impact on the radiation spectra is demonstrated on a large scale LWFA simulation.

Tuning and Optimization for a Variety of Many-Core Architectures Without Changing a Single Line of Implementation Code Using the Alpaka Library

We present an analysis on optimizing performance of a single C++11 source code using the Alpaka hardware abstraction library. For this we use the general matrix multiplication (GEMM) algorithm in order to show that compilers can optimize Alpaka code effectively when tuning key parameters of the algorithm. We do not intend to rival existing, highly optimized DGEMM versions, but merely choose this example to prove that Alpaka allows for platform-specific tuning with a single source code. In addition we analyze the optimization potential available with vendor-specific compilers when confronted with the heavily templated abstractions of Alpaka. We specifically test the code for bleeding edge architectures such as Nvidias Tesla P100, Intels Knights Landing (KNL) and Haswell architecture as well as IBMs Power8 system. On some of these we are able to reach almost 50\% of the peak floating point operation performance using the aforementioned means. When adding compiler-specific #pragmas we are able to reach 5 TFLOPS/s on a P100 and over 1 TFLOPS/s on a KNL system.