There are many astrophysical and laboratory scenarios where kinetic effects play an important role. These range from astrophysical shocks and plasma shell collisions to high intensity laser–plasma interactions, with applications to fast ignition and particle acceleration. Further understanding of these scenarios requires detailed numerical modeling, but fully relativistic kinetic codes are computationally intensive, and the goal of one-to-one direct modeling of such scenarios and direct comparison with experimental results is still difficult to achieve. In this paper we discuss the issues involved in performing kinetic plasma simulations of experiments and astrophysical scenarios, focusing on what needs to be achieved for one-to-one direct modeling and the computational requirements involved. We focus on code efficiency and new algorithms, specifically on parallel scalability issues, namely, on dynamic load balancing, and on high-order interpolation and boosted frame simulations to optimize simulation performance. We also discuss the new visualization and data mining tools required for these numerical experiments and recent simulation work illustrating these techniques is also presented.
天体物理和实验室中存在许多动理学效应发挥重要作用的场景，其范围从天体物理激波和等离子体壳层碰撞，到高强度激光与等离子体相互作用，并涉及快点火和粒子加速等应用。对这些场景的进一步理解需要详细的数值模拟，但完全相对论性的动理学代码计算强度极高，要实现此类场景的一对一直接模拟以及与实验结果的直接比较仍然困难。本文讨论了在实验和天体物理场景中进行动理学等离子体模拟所涉及的问题，重点关注为实现一对一直接模拟需要达到的条件以及所涉及的计算需求。我们聚焦于代码效率和新型算法，特别是并行可扩展性问题，即动态负载平衡，以及高阶插值和增广参考系模拟，以优化模拟性能。我们还讨论了这些数值实验所需的新型可视化和数据挖掘工具，并展示了近期体现这些技术的模拟工作。