Performance analysis and application of 2-D plasma parallel particle-in-cell simulations

The implementation of a 2D parallel particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation with domain partition is presented. Its performance is tested on a PC cluster of 16 Pentium III 1.6 G CPUs. It shows that the parallel efficiency decreases with the increase of computation nodes while keeping the calculation size, and the parallel efficiency increases with the size of physical problem while keeping the number of computational nodes. It means that parallel computing is suitable for large physical problems. As an example, a calculation on plasma beam instability is performed with this parallel PIC code. The results show that in the linear growth stage, the excited Alfven waves propagate in the direction of ambient magnetic field, and they satisfy a resonant condition ω-kVb=-Ωi, where ω and k are frequency and wave number of the excited Alfven waves respectively, Vb is the beam velocity and Ωi is the ion cyclotron frequency.