Optimization of particle-in-cell simulations for Vlasov-Poisson system with strong magnetic field

Abstract

We study the dynamics of charged particles under the influence of a strong magnetic field by numerically solving the Vlasov-Poisson and guiding center models. By using appropriate data structures, we implement an efficient (from the memory access point of view) particle-in-cell method which enables simulations with a large number of particles. We present numerical results for classical one-dimensional Landau damping and two-dimensional Kelvin-Helmholtz test cases. The implementation also relies on a standard hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelization. Code performance is assessed by the observed speedup and attained memory bandwidth.