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Performance analysis and implementation details of the Energy Conserving Semi-Implicit Method code (ECsim)

Journal Article · · Computer Physics Communications

We present in this work the implementation of the Energy Conserving Semi-Implicit Method in a parallel code called ECsim. This new code is a three-dimensional, fully electromagnetic particle in cell (PIC) code. It is written in C/C++ and uses MPI to allow massive parallelization. ECsim is unconditionally stable in time, eliminates the finite grid instability, and has the same cycle scheme as the explicit code with a computational cost comparable to other semi-implicit PIC codes. All these features make it a very valuable tool to address situations which have not been possible to analyze until now with other PIC codes. In this work, we show the details of the algorithm implementation and we study its performance in different systems. ECsim is compared with another semi-implicit PIC code with different time and spectral resolution, showing its ability to address situations where other codes fail.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC); Univ. of California, Oakland, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1543535
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1582836
Journal Information:
Computer Physics Communications, Journal Name: Computer Physics Communications Journal Issue: C Vol. 229; ISSN 0010-4655
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (9)

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The energy conserving particle-in-cell method journal August 2011
Exactly energy conserving semi-implicit particle in cell formulation journal April 2017
An implicit method for electromagnetic plasma simulation in two dimensions journal May 1982
An energy- and charge-conserving, implicit, electrostatic particle-in-cell algorithm journal August 2011
Multi-scale simulations of plasma with iPIC3D journal March 2010
Multiple-scale kinetic simulations with the energy conserving semi-implicit particle in cell method journal April 2017
Secondary reconnection sites in reconnection-generated flux ropes and reconnection fronts journal July 2015
Kinetic approach to microscopic-macroscopic coupling in space and laboratory plasmas journal May 2006

Cited By (3)

Multi-scale simulations of particle acceleration in astrophysical systems journal March 2020
Multi-Scale Kinetic Simulation of Magnetic Reconnection With Dynamically Adaptive Meshes journal October 2018
A Semi-implicit Particle-in-cell Expanding Box Model Code for Fully Kinetic Simulations of the Expanding Solar Wind Plasma journal January 2019

Figures / Tables (14)


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