Fast parallel Particle-To-Grid interpolation for plasma PIC simulations on the GPU
Particle-In-Cell (PIC) methods have been widely used for plasma physics simulations in the past three decades. To ensure an acceptable level of statistical accuracy relatively large numbers of particles are needed. State-of-the-art Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), with their high memory bandwidth. hundreds of SPMD processors, and half-a-teraflop performance potential, offer a viable alternative to distributed memory parallel computers for running medium-scale PICplasma simulations on inexpensive commodity hardware. In this paper, we present an overview of a typical plasma PIC code and discuss its GPU implementation. In particular we focus on fast algorithms for the performance bottleneck operation of Particle-To-Grid interpolation. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
plasma physics gpu computing scientific computing parallel algorithms numerical simulations particle-in-cell methods