University of Heidelberg

Software - PicPanther

Kinetic simulations of collisionless plasma mostly need to resolve the smallest scales in a plasma, limiting the problem domains that can be tackled. The Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition poses further problems. Explicit algorithms require large amounts of computational power to cope with these restrictions. Implementations of implicit algorithms, on the other hand, are very complex. Very few implicit codes are openly available and approachable. Fully relativistic, three-dimensional electromagnetic im-plicit PiC codes in particular are rare in general.

In my group an implicit code has been developed: PICPANTHER: A simple, concise implementation of the relativistic moment implicit particle-in-cell method (Kempf, Kilian, Ganse, Schreiner, and Spanier 2015, Computer Physics Communications) .

PICPANTHER implements the relativistic moment implicit particle-in-cell method. The implicit electric field equation is solved using the GMRES algorithm with operators represented as sparse matrices. For each particle, the implicit equation of motion is solved via a robust Newton-Krylov scheme. Parallelization is achieved using simple domain decomposition, resulting in good scalability.

PICPANTHER only allows for Euclidean geometries. Currently, only periodic boundary conditions are provided.Unusual features:PICPANTHER makes use of advanced numerical tech-niques (GMRES, Newton-Krylov) to implicitly solve relativistic versions of the movement and field equations of a PiC code. It was designed to be simple and concise, using advanced C++11 language features. Moreover, it is parallelized and exhibits good scaling behavior.

PICPANTHER is freely available in the Computer Physics Communications library!
Kempf, Andreas; Kilian, Patrick; Ganse, Urs; Schreiner, Cedric; Spanier, Felix (2015), “PICPANTHER: A simple, concise implementation of the relativistic moment implicit particle-in-cell method ”, Mendeley Data, V1, DOI 10.17632/gcy5p3ddfb.1

Responsible: Felix Spanier, last modification Oct/12/2020 14:23 CEST
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