Recently, task-based programming models have emerged as a prominent
alternative among shared-memory parallel programming paradigms. Inherently
asynchronous, these models provide native support for dynamic load balancing
and incorporate data flow concepts to selectively synchronize the tasks.
However, tasking models are yet to be widely adopted by the HPC community and
their effective advantages when applied to non-trivial, real-world HPC
applications are still not well comprehended. In this paper, we study the
parallelization of a production electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) code
for kinetic plasma simulations exploring different strategies using
asynchronous task-based models. Our fully asynchronous implementation not only
significantly outperforms a conventional, synchronous approach but also
achieves near perfect scaling for 48 cores.Comment: To be published on the 27th European Conference on Parallel and
Distributed Computing (Euro-Par 2021