  We present recent developments in the parallelization scheme of ECHO-3DHPC,
an efficient astrophysical code used in the modelling of relativistic plasmas.
With the help of the Intel Software Development Tools, like Fortran compiler
and Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO), Intel MPI library, VTune Amplifier and
Inspector we have investigated the performance issues and improved the
application scalability and the time to solution. The node-level performance is
improved by $2.3 \times$ and, thanks to the improved threading parallelisation,
the hybrid MPI-OpenMP version of the code outperforms the MPI-only, thus
lowering the MPI communication overhead.
