  There are many astrophysical and laboratory scenarios where kinetic effects
play an important role. These range from astrophysical shocks and plasma shell
collisions, to high intensity laser-plasma interactions, with applications to
fast ignition and particle acceleration. Further understanding of these
scenarios requires detailed numerical modelling, but fully relativistic kinetic
codes are computationally intensive, and the goal of one-to-one direct
modelling of such scenarios and direct comparison with experimental results is
still difficult to achieve. In this paper we discuss the issues involved in
performing kinetic plasma simulations of experiments and astrophysical
scenarios, focusing on what needs to be achieved for one-to-one direct
modeling, and the computational requirements involved. We focus on code
efficiency and new algorithms, specifically on parallel scalability issues,
namely on dynamic load balancing, and on high-order interpolation and boosted
frame simulations to optimize simulation performance. We also discuss the new
visualization and data mining tools required for these numerical experiments
and recent simulation work illustrating these techniques is also presented.
