Plasma-PEPSC - Pushing Flagship Plasma Simulation Codes to Tackle Exascale-Enabled Grand Challenges via Performance Optimisation and Codesign

Most of the visible universe is made up of plasma, the fourth state of matter. Therefore, understanding our Universe and unlocking the nature of countless astrophysical, space, and atmospheric phenomena involves understanding plasma behaviour. Moreover, fusion energy research as well as an increasing number of modern industries critically depend on plasma science and technology such as magnetic and inertial confinement fusion, electric propulsion, biomedicine, food processing or chip manufacturing. Thus, plasma simulations contribute significantly to several societal challenges, particularly decarbonisation through fusion energy, health and wellbeing through plasma medicine, as well as safety and security by understanding the effects of space weather on satellites and Earth-based communication and power distribution. Plasma-PEPSC is one of four EuroHPC Centres of Excellence preparing applications in the Exascale era funded in the HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01 framework. Plasma-PEPSC will provide efficient computational tools addressing these grand challenges. We focus our efforts on four European flagship plasma simulation codes with a large user base, BIT, GENE, PIConGPU and Vlasiator, bringing together a complementary and interdisciplinary team of world-leading domain scientists from plasma physics, HPC, computational science, software engineering, and data analytics. Our interactive BoF will bring together the developers of the flagship codes, key Exascale software components (e.g. MPI, I/O libraries, etc.), the EPI, EuPILOT, and EUPEX and the user communities. Together, we will identify the core challenges for the Plasma-PEPSC flagship codes towards use of future Exascale systems and foster exchange between software ecosystem developers, application developers, plasma scientists and the user communities.