Abstract
Particle-in-cell (PIC) codes are suited for simulating kinetic effects relevant in determining the transport mechanisms in magnetically confined plasmas. A significant improvement of the simulation performance of such codes can be expected from parallelization, e.g., by distributing the particle population among several parallel processors. Parallelization of a hybrid MHD-girokinetic PIC code has been accomplished within the High Performance Fortran (HPF) framework, and tested on the IBM SP2 parallel system, using a “particle decomposition” technique. The adopted technique requires a moderate effort in porting the code in parallel form and results in intrinsic load balancing and modest inter-processor communication. The performance tests obtained confirm the hypothesis of high effectiveness of the strategy, if targeted towards moderately parallel architectures. Optimal use of resources is also discussed with reference to a specific physics problem.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Di Martino, B., Briguglio, S., Vlad, G., Sguazzero, P. (1998). Parallel plasma simulation in high performance Fortran. In: Sloot, P., Bubak, M., Hertzberger, B. (eds) High-Performance Computing and Networking. HPCN-Europe 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1401. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0037147
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0037147
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