The Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) have been awarded a three year grant from the National Science Foundation under their Physics at the Information Frontier Program. Dr. Viktor Decyk, who has a joint position in the Physics and Astronomy Department and IDRE, is the UCLA Principal Investigator. This grant, in collaboration with the University of Rochester, funds the development of Particle-in-Cell(PIC) algorithms for advanced computer architectures, and the UCLA share is $210,000. Such codes are widely used in many areas of plasma physics, and they use a substantial amount of computer time on the largest supercomputers in the world. Computer architectures are rapidly evolving to require multiple layers of parallelism. It is becoming very difficult for application programmers to take advantage of the new hardware. A set of general skeleton codes will be made available for education and research to illustrate the data structures, parallel algorithms, and programming methodologies that enable PIC codes to run effectively on the next generation of computers.

For more information, please visit the National Science Foundation’s Awards page.