ALPINE: A set of performance portable plasma physics particle-in-cell mini-apps for exascale computing

Alpine consists of a set of mini-apps that makes use of exascale computing capabilities to numerically solve some classical problems in plasma physics. It is based on IPPL (Independent Parallel Particle Layer), a framework that is designed around performance portable and dimension independent particles and fields. In this work, IPPL is used to implement a particle-in-cell scheme. The article describes in detail the following mini-apps: weak and strong Landau damping, bump-on-tail and two-stream instabilities, and the dynamics of an electron bunch in a charge-neutral Penning trap. We benchmark the simulations with varying parameters such as grid resolutions ($512^3$ to $2048^3$) and number of simulation particles ($10^9$ to $10^{11}$). We show strong and weak scaling and analyze the performance of different components on several pre-exascale architectures such as Piz-Daint, Cori, Summit and Perlmutter.