Porting the Plasma Simulation PIConGPU to Heterogeneous Architectures with Alpaka

We discuss our experience on porting the CUDA-based plasma simulation code PIConGPU to heterogeneous platforms using the abstract kernel interface Alpaka. With the advent of next-generation architectures such as OpenPower, the full use of the hardware and the mapping of CPUs and GPUs to specific simulation tasks has become important. Performance portability is of great interest, but even more important is the ability to develop against a single interface to keep code testable and maintainable. We show how we can make use of the Alpaka library in real-world applications and how we achieve portability and performance.