Independent Parallel Particle Layer (IPPL)

Independent Parallel Particle Layer (IPPL) is a performance portable C++ library for Particle-Mesh methods. IPPL makes use of Kokkos (https://github.com/kokkos/kokkos), HeFFTe (https://github.com/icl-utk-edu/heffte), and MPI (Message Passing Interface) to deliver a portable, massively parallel toolkit for particle-mesh methods. IPPL supports simulations in one to six dimensions, mixed precision, and asynchronous execution in different execution spaces (e.g. CPUs and GPUs).

All IPPL releases (< 3.2.0) are available under the BSD 3-clause license. Since version 3.2.0, this repository includes a modified version of the variant header by GNU, created to support compilation under CUDA 12.2 with GCC 12.3.0. This header file is available under the same terms as the GNU Standard Library; note the GNU runtime library exception. As long as this file is not removed, IPPL is available under GNU GPL version 3.

Installing IPPL and its dependencies

All the new developments of IPPL are merged into the master branch which can make it potentially unstable from time to time. So if you want a stable and more tested version please checkout the tagged branch correspodning to the latest release (e.g. git checkout tags/IPPL-x.x.x). Otherwise if you want the latest developments go with the master with the above caveat in mind.

Requirements

CMake
A C++ compilation toolchain (GPU-capable for GPU builds, e.g. nvcc, [clang]() or rocmcc)
MPI (GPU-aware if building for GPUs)

Optional requirements

FFTW
CuFFT

Compilation

IPPL is a CMake Project and can be configured by passing options in CMake syntax:

cmake <src_dir> -D<option>=<value>

None of the options have to be set explicitly, all have a default.

The relevant options of IPPL are

IPPL_PLATFORMS, can be one of SERIAL, OPENMP, CUDA, "OPENMP;CUDA", default SERIAL
Kokkos_VERSION, default 4.1.00
Heffte_VERSION, default MASTER
- If set to MASTER, an additional flag Heffte_COMMIT_HASH can be set, default 9eab7c0eb18e86acaccc2b5699b30e85a9e7bdda
- Currently, this is the only compatible commit of Heffte
ENABLE_SOLVERS, default OFF
ENABLE_FFT, default OFF
- If ENABLE_FFT is set, Heffte_ENABLE_CUDA will default to ON if IPPL_PLATFORMS contains cuda
- Otherwise, Heffte_ENABLE_AVX2 is enabled. FFTW has to be enabled explicitly.
Heffte_ENABLE_FFTW, default OFF
ENABLE_TESTS, default OFF
ENABLE_UNIT_TESTS, default OFF
ENABLE_ALPINE, default OFF
USE_ALTERNATIVE_VARIANT, default OFF. Can turned on for GPU builds where the use of the system-provided variant doesn't work.

Furthermore, be aware of CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE, which can be either

Release for optimized builds
RelWithDebInfo for optimized builds with debug info (default)
Debug for debug builds (with Sanitizers enabled)

Examples

Download and setup a build directory:

https://github.com/IPPL-framework/ippl
cd ippl
mkdir build
cd build

Serial debug build with tests and newest Kokkos

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=20 -DENABLE_TESTS=True -DKokkos_VERSION=4.2.00

OpenMP release build with alpine and FFTW

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=20 -DENABLE_FFT=ON -DENABLE_SOLVERS=ON -DENABLE_ALPINE=True -DENABLE_TESTS=ON -DIPPL_PLATFORMS=openmp -DHeffte_ENABLE_FFTW=True

Cuda alpine release build

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DKokkos_ARCH_[architecture]=ON -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=20 -DENABLE_FFT=ON -DENABLE_TESTS=ON -DUSE_ALTERNATIVE_VARIANT=ON -DENABLE_SOLVERS=ON -DENABLE_ALPINE=True -DIPPL_PLATFORMS=cuda

[architecture] should be the target architecture, e.g.

PASCAL60
PASCAL61
VOLTA70
VOLTA72
TURING75
AMPERE80 (PSI GWENDOLEN machine)
AMPERE86

Contributions

We are open and welcome contributions from others. Please open an issue and a corresponding pull request in the main repository if it is a bug fix or a minor change.

For larger projects we recommend to fork the main repository and then submit a pull request from it. More information regarding github workflow for forks can be found in this page and how to submit a pull request from a fork can be found here. Please follow the coding guidelines as mentioned in this page.

You can add an upstream to be able to get all the latest changes from the master. For example, if you are working with a fork of the main repository, you can add the upstream by:

$ git remote add upstream git@github.com:IPPL-framework/ippl.git

You can then easily pull by typing

$ git pull upstream master
````
All the contributions (except for bug fixes) need to be accompanied with a unit test. For more information on unit tests in IPPL please
take a look at this [page](https://github.com/IPPL-framework/ippl/blob/master/UNIT_TESTS.md).
 
## Citing IPPL

@inproceedings{muralikrishnan2024scaling, title={Scaling and performance portability of the particle-in-cell scheme for plasma physics applications through mini-apps targeting exascale architectures}, author={Muralikrishnan, Sriramkrishnan and Frey, Matthias and Vinciguerra, Alessandro and Ligotino, Michael and Cerfon, Antoine J and Stoyanov, Miroslav and Gayatri, Rahulkumar and Adelmann, Andreas}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 2024 SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP)}, pages={26–38}, year={2024}, organization={SIAM} } ```