Virtual BSP Computer Plasma Simulation Overview Plasma is a mixture of charged and neutral particles that exhibit collective behavior. Understanding the behavior of plasma is important for several reasons including research in fusion energy. The simulation uses a method known as Particle In Cell method. Using this method, we simulate the trajectories of millions of particles in their self-induced electromagnetic fields.
Particles can be anywhere in the spatial domain.
The field quantities, however, are computed on a fixed grid. The particles are evenly distributed among the processors. As particles move among the partitioned regions, they are passed to the processor responsible for the new region. To enable solving of the field equations on the grid efficient, a secondary temporary decomposition is used to partition the simulation space evenly among the processors. After computing charge deposition by the particles, grid point data are exchanged among the processors to allow processors to solve field equations in their secondary partitions.