Description
WarpX[1,2] is an advanced, electromagnetic and electrostatic, free and open-source Particle-In-Cell code, hosted by the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). It supports many features, which make it suitable to tackle a wide variety of scientific problems, from laser-plasma interaction to plasma astrophysics, accelerator physics, and the conception of nuclear fusion devices. WarpX is a highly-parallel and highly-optimized code, capable of running on GPU-based machines, and scaling to the largest exascale supercomputers in the world (Gordon Bell prize awarded in 2022 [2]).
The WarpX project benefits from growing international community of users and developers, both from academia and the private sector, and a widening range of applications. In this contribution we provide an overview of the capabilities of the code, highlighting recent developments and unique features. In particular, the following will be discussed:
• advances in the multi-physics packages (improved collision modules, additional strong-field QED processes…)
• new fully implicit electromagnetic solvers
• mesh refinement, a unique feature among electromagnetic Particle-in-Cell codes
• coupling of WarpX to machine-learning frameworks
• performance improvements on CPU-based machines (portable SIMD support)
[1] WarpX documentation: https://warpx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[2] J.-L. Vay et al. BLAST-WarpX/warpx: 26.02 (2026). Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18475787
[3] L.Fedeli et al. Pushing the Frontier in the Design of Laser-Based Electron Accelerators with Groundbreaking Mesh-Refined Particle-In-Cell Simulations on Exascale-Class Supercomputers. In SC22: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (pp. 1-12). IEEE Computer Society, 2022