Patent ID: 7526415

Claim:
A method for computing forces on charged particles using a computer system comprising a plurality of physical computing nodes, the method comprising: processing on the plurality of nodes data for a set of charged particles, each node storing data for a corresponding sub-set of the set of particles within a region associated with the node, the processing including processing in the computer system data characterizing a charge distribution associated with a set of charged particles according to a spreading function and a predefined operation, the spreading function being representable as a convolution of a first spreading function and a second spreading function, the first spreading function representing a different distribution than the second spreading function, the processing of the charge distribution comprising: applying the first spreading function in a real domain to determine charge values at locations on a grid from the charge distribution; applying the operation on the grid to the determined charge values on the grid in the real domain; applying the second spreading function to the result of applying the operation to generate data characterizing forces on the set of charged particles; and at each node, according to the generated data, updating the data for the corresponding sub-set of the set of particles within a region associated with the node.