We review common extensions of particle-in-cell (PIC) schemes which account for strong field phenomena in laser-plasma interactions. After describing the physical processes of interest and their numerical implementation, we provide solutions for several associated methodological and algorithmic problems. We propose a modified event generator that precisely models the entire spectrum of incoherent particle emission without any low-energy cutoff, and which imposes close to the weakest possible demands on the numerical time step. Based on this, we also develop an adaptive event generator that subdivides the time step for locally resolving QED events, allowing for efficient simulation of cascades. Further, we present a new and unified technical interface for including the processes of interest in different PIC implementations. Two PIC codes which support this interface, PICADOR and ELMIS, are also briefly reviewed. CONTENTS

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a b s t r a c tThis paper concerns the development of a high-performance implementation of the Particle-in-Cell method for plasma simulation on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. We discuss the suitability of the method for Xeon Phi architecture and present our experience in the porting and optimization of the existing parallel Particle-in-Cell code PICADOR. Direct porting without code modification gives performance on Xeon Phi close to that of an 8-core CPU on a benchmark problem with 50 particles per cell. We demonstrate step-by-step optimization techniques, such as improving data locality, enhancing parallelization efficiency and vectorization leading to an overall 4.2× speedup on CPU and 7.5× on Xeon Phi compared to the baseline version. The optimized version achieves 16.9 ns per particle update on an Intel Xeon E5-2660 CPU and 9.3 ns per particle update on an Intel Xeon Phi 5110P. For a real problem of laser ion acceleration in targets with surface grating, where a large number of macroparticles per cell is required, the speedup of Xeon Phi compared to CPU is 1.6×.

Abstract. Three dimensional particle-in-cell laser-plasma simulation is an important area of computational physics. Solving state-of-the-art problems requires large-scale simulation on a supercomputer using specialized codes. A growing demand in computational resources inspires research in improving efficiency and co-design for supercomputers based on manycore architectures. This paper presents first performance results of the particle-in-cell plasma simulation code PICADOR on the recently introduced