by Igor A Andriyash (igor.andriyash@gmail.com)
CHIMERA(.CL) is a project of a relativistic electromagnetic particle-in-cell code, based on a quasi-cylindric pseudo-spectral analytical time domain (PSATD) Maxwell solver. More details on this method can be found in the original publications [1,2,3].
The project spins off from the original code CHIMERA and is aimed to be firstly a playground to learn (py)openCL approach to GPGPU programming. The second goal of CHIMERA(.CL) is to design the code with maximum flexibility:
- code should be divided into (i) wrapper classes that are independent of computational part (e.g. particles.py and grid.py), and (ii) compiled methods (cf ./methods/) as much general as possible.
- computational data should be presented with 'device' abstraction
- all data structures should be grouped into containers of dictionary type with comprehensive naming
Presenly developed methods are using openCL via PyOpenCL API which also benefits from a few methods provided by Reikna.
Code also includes the tvtk-based script to convert the output gerenated by the code into the VTK containers (see example below).
Examples of the simulation scripts and Paraview state-file for visualising the VTK files can be found in ./examples/ folder.
System requirements
- Linux or MacOS (not tested on Windows)
- python distribution with numpy and scipy (matplotlib is also helpful)
- openCL driver (tested with version 1.2 )
- PyOpenCL
- Reikna library
- pyFFTW (Reikna's FFT crashes on Apple CPUs, cause Apple are geniuses, so it's replaced for them)
- path to the code should be known to python (e.g. exported to PYTHONPATH)
[1] Igor A. Andriyash, Remi Lehe and Agustin Lifschitz, Laser-plasma interactions with a Fourier-Bessel particle-in-cell method, Physics of Plasmas 23, 033110 (2016)
[2] Remi Lehe, Manuel Kirchen, Igor A. Andriyash, Brendan B. Godfrey and Jean-Luc Vay, A spectral, quasi-cylindrical and dispersion-free Particle-In-Cell algorithm, Computer Physics Communications 203, 66 (2016)
[3] Igor A. Andriyash, Remi Lehe and Victor Malka, A spectral unaveraged algorithm for free electron laser simulations, Journal of Computational Physics 282, 397 (2015)