March 3, 2026Open Access

The PLUTO code on GPUs: A first look at Eulerian MHD methods

Key Points

gPLUTO demonstrates significant performance potential on NVIDIA GPUs, suggesting efficiency in calculations.
Initial performance tests indicate promising results in computational plasma astrophysics using gPLUTO's methods.
Assessment using the Eulerian finite-volume method showcases the new GPU-optimized implementation's capabilities.
Highlights the need for further validation and development of gPLUTO to fully exploit pre exa-scale architectures.

Abstract

We present preliminary performance results of gPLUTO , the new GPU-optimized implementation of the PLUTO code for computational plasma astrophysics. Like its predecessor, gPLUTO employs a Eulerian finite-volume formulation to numerically solve the equations of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in multiple spatial dimensions. Still, this new implementation is a complete rewrite in C++ and leverages the OpenACC programming model to achieve acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs. While a more comprehensive description of the code and its several other modules will be presented in a future paper, here we focus on some preparatory results that demonstrate the code potential and performance on pre exa-scale parallel architectures.

The PLUTO code on GPUs: A first look at Eulerian MHD methods

Key Points

Abstract

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