Optilization of the gyroaverage operator based on hermite interpolation
This work reduces the computational cost of a key operator in gyrokinetic simulations for Tokamak plasma turbulence, addressing a performance bottleneck in the Gysela code.
The authors improved the gyroaverage operator in the Gysela code by reformulating it as a matrix-vector product and implementing a cache-friendly algorithm, achieving a speedup of more than a factor of two.
Gyrokinetic modeling is appropriate for describing Tokamak plasma turbulence, and the gyroaverage operator is a cornerstone of this approach. In a gyrokinetic code, the gyroaveraging scheme needs to be accurate enough to avoid spoiling the data but also requires a low computation cost because it is applied often on the main unknown, the 5D guiding-center distribution function, and on the 3D electric potentials. In the present paper, we improve a gyroaverage scheme based on Hermite interpolation used in the Gysela code. This initial implementation represents a too large fraction of the total execution time. The gyroaverage operator has been reformulated and is now expressed as a matrix-vector product and a cache-friendly algorithm has been setup. Different techniques have been investigated to quicken the computations by more than a factor two. Description of the algorithms is given, together with an analysis of the achieved performance.