3-D electromagnetic plasma particle simulations on the Intel Delta parallel computer
- California Inst. of Tech., Pasadena, CA (United States). Jet Propulsion Lab.
- Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)
A three-dimensional electromagnetic PIC code has been developed on the 512 node Intel Touchstone Delta MIMD parallel computer. This code is based on the General Concurrent PIC algorithm which uses a domain decomposition to divide the computation among the processors. The 3D simulation domain can be partitioned into 1-, 2-, or 3-dimensional sub-domains. Particles must be exchanged between processors as they move among the subdomains. The Intel Delta allows one to use this code for very-large-scale simulations (i.e. over 10{sup 8} particles and 10{sup 6} grid cells). The parallel efficiency of this code is measured, and the overall code performance on the Delta is compared with that on Cray supercomputers. It is shown that their code runs with a high parallel efficiency of {ge} 95% for large size problems. The particle push time achieved is 115 nsecs/particle/time step for 162 million particles on 512 nodes. Comparing with the performance on a single processor Cray C90, this represents a factor of 58 speedup. The code uses a finite-difference leap frog method for field solve which is significantly more efficient than fast fourier transforms on parallel computers. The performance of this code on the 128 node Cray T3D will also be discussed.
- OSTI ID:
- 46192
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-940604--; ISBN 0-7803-2006-9
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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