Using WarpX, a general purpose particle-in-cell code
WarpX is an advanced electromagnetic and electrostatic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code that has applications in a variety of scientific domains, such as plasma physics, laser-plasma interactions, particle accelerators, and fusion devices. WarpX is a massively-parallel and highly-optimized code, which can run on GPUs and multicore CPUs. Moreover, WarpX is also a multi-platform code and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
In this tutorial, we show how to use WarpX on a generic laptop with minimal requirements (essentially a mature compiler and conda or CMake). We build the code (either using the package manager conda or from source) and run a simple fusion-relevant example. In addition, we visualize the results with standard tools like Matplotlib and Paraview. Throughout the tutorial, we show how to navigate the code documentation and point to the parts of WarpX’s GitHub repository that can be of interest to new users.