VPIC v.1.2
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Vector Particle-in-Cell (VPIC) is a general purpose particle-in-cell simulation code for modeling kinetic plasmas in one, two, or three spatial dimensions. It employs a second-order, explicit, leapfrog algorithm to update charged particle positions and velocities in order to solve the relativistic kinetic equation for each species in the plasma, along with a full Maxwell description for the electric and magnetic fields evolved via a second- order finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) solve. The VPIC code has been optimized for modern computing architectures and uses Message Passing Interface (MPI) calls for multi-node application as well as data parallelism using threads. VPIC employs a variety of short-vector, single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) intrinsics for high performance and has been designed so that the data structures align with cache boundaries. The current feature set for VPIC includes a flexible input deck format capable of treating a wide variety of problems. These include: the ability to treat electromagnetic materials (scalar and tensor dielectric, conductivity, and diamagnetic material properties); multiple emission models, including user-configurable models; arbitrary, user-configurable boundary conditions for particles and fields; user- definable simulation units; a suite of "standard" diagnostics, as well as user-configurable diagnostics; a Monte-Carlo treatment of collisional processes capable of treating binary and unary collisions and secondary particle generation; and, flexible checkpoint-restart semantics enabling VPIC checkpoint files to be read as input for subsequent simulations. VPIC has a native I/O format that interfaces with the high-performance visualization software Ensight and Paraview. While the common use cases for VPIC employ low-order particles on rectilinear meshes, a framework exists to treat higher-order particles and curvilinear meshes, as well as more advanced field solvers.
- Short Name / Acronym:
- vpic
- Project Type:
- Open Source, Publicly Available Repository
- Software Type:
- Scientific
- Version:
- 1.2
- License(s):
- BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
- Programming Language(s):
- C++; C
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)Primary Award/Contract Number:89233218CNA000001
- DOE Contract Number:
- 89233218CNA000001
- Code ID:
- 54424
- OSTI ID:
- 1777348
- Country of Origin:
- United States
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