Particle-in-Cell Simulation Codes in High Performance Fortran

Particle-in-Cell (PIC) plasma simulation codes model the interaction of charged particles with surrounding electrostatic and magnetic fields. PIC's computational requirements are classified at as one of the grand-challenge problems facing the high-performance community. In this paper we present the implementation of 1-D and 2-D electrostatic PIC codes in High Performance Fortran (HPF) on an IBM SP-2. We used one of the most successful commercial HPF compilers currently available and augmented the compiler's missing HPF functions with extrinsic routines when necessary. We obtained a near linear speed-up in execution time and a performance comparable to the native message-passing implementations on the same platform.

[1]  Harry Berryman,et al.  Parallel Loops on Distributed Machines , 1990, Proceedings of the Fifth Distributed Memory Computing Conference, 1990..

[2]  Viktor K. Decyk,et al.  Skeleton PIC Codes for Parallel Computers , 1995 .

[3]  R W Hockney,et al.  Computer Simulation Using Particles , 1966 .

[4]  David W. Walker,et al.  Particle-in-cell plasma simulation codes on the Connection Machine , 1991 .

[5]  Marina C. Chen,et al.  Compiling Communication-Efficient Programs for Massively Parallel Machines , 1991, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[6]  Viktor K. Decyk,et al.  A general concurrent algorithm for plasma particle-in-cell simulation codes , 1989 .

[7]  Rice UniversityCORPORATE,et al.  High performance Fortran language specification , 1993 .

[8]  David W. Walker,et al.  Characterizing the Parallel Performance of a Large-scale, Particle-in-cell Plasma Simulation Code , 1990, Concurr. Pract. Exp..

[9]  Satoshi Sekiguchi,et al.  Mapping schemes of the particle-in-cell method implemented on the PAX computer , 1988, Parallel Comput..

[10]  Boleslaw K. Szymanski,et al.  Object-oriented parallel computation for plasma simulation , 1995, CACM.

[11]  C. Birdsall,et al.  Plasma Physics via Computer Simulation , 2018 .

[12]  Viktor K. Decyk,et al.  Dynamic load balancing for a 2D concurrent plasma PIC code , 1993 .

[13]  Vaidy S. Sunderam,et al.  PVM: A Framework for Parallel Distributed Computing , 1990, Concurr. Pract. Exp..

[14]  Guy L. Steele,et al.  The High Performance Fortran Handbook , 1993 .

[15]  Corporate Rice University,et al.  High performance Fortran language specification , 1993, FORF.

[16]  Michael Metcalf,et al.  Fortran 90 Explained , 1990 .