Picasso is a performance portable library for particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations which are used in applications including plasmas physics and fluid/solid mechanics. Picasso provides a range of interpolation schemes between particles and grids, both in order of the scheme and the type (FLIP, APIC, PolyPIC), embedded free-surface tracking, extensive batched linear algebra capabilties, as well as utilities for managing field data and simplifying parallel execution.
Picasso's main dependency is Cabana. The instructions for building Cabana can be found in the Cabana wiki Cabana requires the Kokkos library and must be built with the optional Cabana::Grid subpackage enabled (which in turn requires MPI).
Picasso Dependencies
| Dependency | Required | CMake Variable | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMake | Yes | Build system | |
| Kokkos | Yes | Portable on-node parallelism | |
| Cabana | Yes | Performance-portable particle and grid library | |
| MPI | Yes | Message Passing Interface | |
| JSON | Yes | JSON input files | |
| ArborX | No | Picasso_REQUIRE_ARBORX | Performance-portable geometric search (required for level-set) |
| GTest | No | Picasso_REQUIRE_TESTING | Unit test Framework |
In addition to these required dependencies, note that Cabana must be built with
Cabana_ENABLE_GRID=ON (enabled by default) and will need further options as noted below for some additional capabilities.
There are additional optional dependencies for Picasso that depend on the use case desired or hardware type on the system.
Picasso dependencies imported from Cabana. Note that the REQUIRE variables enforce that those options are
available for Cabana at configuration, but are not necessary.
| Dependency | Required | CMake Variable | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| HDF5 | No | Cabana_REQUIRE_HDF5 | Particle I/O |
| Silo | No | Cabana_REQUIRE_SILO | Particle I/O |
| CUDA | No | Cabana_REQUIRE_CUDA | Programming model for NVIDIA GPUs |
| HIP | No | Cabana_REQUIRE_HIP | Programming model for AMD GPUs |
| SYCL | No | Cabana_REQUIRE_SYCL | Programming model for Intel GPUs |
To build Picasso, clone the repository via
git clone https://github.com/picassodev/picasso.git. Ensure that
you have an install of Cabana with the grid build option
enabled (Cabana Build Details
A Cabana Docker container is maintained to facilitate development with most optional dependencies.
From the the source directory, run the following script to create a build directory for Picasso, configure the Picasso build in that directory, and build Picasso in that directory
# Change directory as needed
export CABANA_DIR='pwd'/Cabana/build/install
cd picasso
cmake \
-B build
-D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-D CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$CABANA_DIR" \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=install \
-D Picasso_ENABLE_TESTING=ON
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
To test your Picasso install, from the build directory of a Picasso
build run with testing enabled, run the ctest command and ensure
that all tests list as passing
We encourage you to contribute to Picasso! Please check the guidelines on how to do so.
If you use Picasso in your work, please cite the appropriate release.
Picasso is distributed under an open source 3-clause BSD license.