TEMF, Darmstadt
Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations are commonly used in the field of computational accelerator physics for modelling the interaction of electromagnetic fields and charged particle beams in complex accelerator geometries. However, the practicability of the method for real world simulations, is often limited by the huge size of accelerator devices and by the large number of computational particles needed for obtaining accurate simulation results. Thus, the parallelization of the computations becomes necessary to permit the solution of such problems in a reasonable time. Different algorithms allowing for an efficient parallel simulation by preserving an equal distribution of the computational workload on the processes while minimizing the interprocess communication are presented. This includes some already known approaches based on a domain decomposition technique as well as novel schemes. The performance of the algorithms is studied in different computational environments with simulation examples including a full 3D simulation of the PITZ-Injector [*].
*A. Oppelt et al Status and First Results from the Upgraded PITZ Facility, Proc. FEL 2005
