Parsek - Parallel Code
Kinetic plasma simulation is the ultimate tool for plasma analysis. One of the prime tools for kinetic simulation is the particle in cell (PIC) method. The explicit or semi-implicit (i.e. implicit only on the fields) PIC method requires exceedingly small time steps and grid spacing, limited by the necessity to resolve the electron plasma frequency, the Debye length and the speed of light (for fully explicit schemes). A different approach is to consider fully implicit PIC methods where both particles and fields are discretized implicitly. This approach allows radically larger time steps and grid spacing, reducing the cost of a simulation by orders of magnitude while keeping the full kinetic treatment. In our previous work, simulations impossible for the explicit PIC method even on massively parallel computers have been made possible on a single processor machine using the implicit PIC code CELESTE3D. We propose here another quantum leap: PARSEK, a parallel cousin of CELESTE3D, based on the same approach but sporting a radically redesigned software architecture (object oriented, where CELESTE3D was structured and written in FORTRAN77/90) and fully parallelized using MPI for both particle and grid communication.