Plasmas are ubiquitous in the universe. Their intricate and complex dynamics have an important impact on solar flares (which are critical to the understanding of space weather). Plasmas are also important in harnessing controlled nuclear fusion and for the development of the next generation of ultra-compact accelerators and light sources. And they are also essential for the most intense lasers, or in extreme astrophysical objects such as pulsars or magnetars. To address some of the scientific and technological challenges associated with plasma kinetics in these scenarios, Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear at Instituto Superior Técnico Lisbon have developed OSIRIS. OSIRIS is a fully relativistic, electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) framework. With it, they've performed some of the largest numerical plasma simulations in supercomputers worldwide.
OSIRIS has been successfully employed in the numerical modelling of several relevant kinetic plasma scenarios - ranging from astrophysical shocks and plasma shell collisions to high-intensity laser-plasma interactions.
OSIRIS is being used in more than 30 institutions by more than 150 researchers worldwide. Written in Fortran 2003 and C, its code is massively parallel, with demonstrated parallel scalability up to 1.6 million cores and sustained petascale performance in production runs.