Quickstart

This page provides a minimal workflow to build and run Astra.

What is Astra?

Astra (Accelerated Spectral code for TuRbulent plAsmas) is a modern, high-performance spectral plasma turbulence code. It is designed for performance portability with Kokkos and FFT backends through Kokkos-fft.

Supported backends include:

CPU (OpenMP/Threads + FFTW)
NVIDIA GPU (CUDA + cuFFT)
AMD GPU (HIP/ROCm + rocFFT)

Prerequisites

You need:

CMake >= 3.16
A C++20-capable compiler
Backend-specific FFT library:
- CPU: FFTW3
- NVIDIA: CUDA Toolkit (cuFFT)
- AMD: ROCm (rocFFT)
Optional: MPI implementation (OpenMPI, MPICH, …)

Download Astra

You can get the latest source code from GitHub by cloning the repository with:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/glesur/astra.git astra
cd astra

Note

If you are updating an already cloned Astra installation (e.g. git pull), you can use the git submodule update --init --recursive command to automatically update submodules.

Build Astra

It is recommended to build in a dedicated directory.

Create and enter a build directory:
mkdir build cd build

Configure with CMake for your target backend.

CPU (FFTW):

cmake .. -DAstra_MPI=ON

NVIDIA GPU (CUDA + cuFFT):

cmake .. \
     -DKokkos_ENABLE_CUDA=ON \
     -DKokkos_ARCH_VOLTA70=ON \
     -DAstra_MPI=ON

AMD GPU (ROCm + rocFFT):

cmake .. \
     -DKokkos_ENABLE_HIP=ON \
     -DAstra_MPI=ON

Compile:
make -j

Run Astra

Run in serial:

./astra -i ../problem/hydro_turbulence.ini

Run with MPI (example with 4 ranks):

mpirun -np 4 ./astra -i ../problem/hydro_turbulence.ini

Next step

After this first run, explore available problem setup files in problem/ and adapt input parameters in .ini files for your target simulations.