XGC

Installation and usage of XGC

What is XGC?

XGC is a gyrokinetic particle-in-cell code, which specializes in the simulation of the edge region of magnetically confined thermonuclear fusion plasma. The simulation domain can include the magnetic separatrix, magnetic axis and the biased material wall. XGC can run in total-delta-f, and conventional delta-f mode. The ion species are always gyrokinetic always except for ETG simulation. Electrons can be adiabatic, massless fluid, driftkinetic, or gyrokinetic (for ETG only).

XGC is a private repository. Ask Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) for access to the repository. The documentation can be found here: XGC Documentation

Installation on SCOREC RHEL9

The master (latest commit 5d2cb943a) or d2neutral can be installed with spack using the following packages:

# This is a Spack Environment file.
#
# It describes a set of packages to be installed, along with
# configuration settings.
spack:
  # add package specs to the `specs` list
  specs:
  - kokkos@4.2.01+openmp+serial
  - cabana@0.5.0
  - fftw
  - petsc@3.15.0+fortran+metis+scalapack
  - adios2@2.8.0
  - netlib-lapack
  - googletest
  view: true
  concretizer:
    unify: true
  packages:
    python:
      externals:
      - spec: python@3.9.18
        prefix: /usr
      buildable: false

with this compiler configuration:

gcc@11.4.1:
        paths:
                cc = /usr/bin/gcc
                cxx = /usr/bin/g++
                f77 = /usr/bin/gfortran
                fc = /usr/bin/gfortran
        modules  = []
        operating system  = rhel9

Run spack concretize -f and spack install to install the packages. Now, before installing XGC, the following changes have to be made to the source code:

Following the XGC convention, a file called CMake/find_dependencies_scorecrh9-spack.cmake should be created with the following content:

find_package(FFTW3 REQUIRED)
find_package(PETSC REQUIRED)
find_package(LAPACK REQUIRED)

To properly install, these files had to be modified too and they are not added to a pull request yet.

In XGC_core/cpp/file_reader.hpp add the following line:

#include <iostream>

In libs/camtimers/CMakeLists.txt replace the following lines:

install (FILES ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/perf_mod.mod DESTINATION include)
install (FILES ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/perf_utils.mod DESTINATION include)

with these lines:

install(FILES ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/libs/camtimers/perf_mod.mod DESTINATION include)
install (FILES ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/libs/camtimers/perf_utils.mod DESTINATION include)

Now, to install XGC, activate the spack environment, load the necessary packages and run the following commands:

export XGC_PLATFORM=scorecrh9-spack

cmake -S . -B build \
  -DCMAKE_Fortran_FLAGS="-fallow-argument-mismatch" \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelwithDebInfo \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=build/install \
  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=$MPICXX \
  -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=$MPICC \
  -DCMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER=$MPIFC

Tips

If you want to avoid spack totally, all the dependencies have to be manually installed following the versions mentioned in the spack environment file above.