The Centre for Computational Plasma Physics (CCPP) brings together work from High Performance Computing, Computational Physics and Plasma Physics based on contributions from the University of Warwick's Computer Science and Physics departments in collaboration with AWE scientists. The Centre will focus on the challenge of developing, deploying and optimising, massively parallel, scientific software in the modern High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. The scale and sophistication of HPC platforms continues to evolve rapidly, this changing landscape presents a technical challenge which requires a understanding of each new generation of hardware and associated software implications. For a number of years AWE scientists and researchers in the fields of HPC, Computational Physics and Plasma Physics have worked with the Computer Science and Physics Departments at the University of Warwick on: problems in multi-scale parallelism and performance modelling; hydrodynamics algorithms; and kinetic plasma modelling. Based on these collaborations the Centre was established at Warwick in 2014.

The focus of the centre will be the support plasma physics code development and work to exploit future HPC resources. The code focus for this work will concentrate on the EPOCH particle-in-cell code for kinetic plasma processes and the Odin project for radiation hydrodynamics. These are both UK community software projects and thus this work therefore feeds into UK wide academic and AWE research in laser-plasma physics and inertial fusion energy.

The Centre is jointly funded by AWE and the University of Warwick.