A new electromagnetic particle-in-cell model with adaptive mesh refinement for high-performance parallel computation

A new electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EMPIC) model with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) has been developed to achieve high-performance parallel computation in distributed memory system. For minimizing the amount and frequency of inter-processor communications, the present study uses the staggering grid scheme with the charge conservation method, which consists only of the local operations. However, the scheme provides no numerical damping for electromagnetic waves regardless of the wavenumber, which results in significant noise in the refinement region that eventually covers over physical signals. In order to suppress the electromagnetic noise, the present study introduces a smoothing method which gives numerical damping preferentially for short wavelength modes. The test simulations show that only a weak smoothing results in drastic reduction in the noise, so that the implementation of the AMR is possible in the staggering grid scheme. The computational load balance among the processors is maintained by a new method termed the adaptive block technique for the domain decomposition parallelization. The adaptive block technique controls the subdomain (block) structure dynamically associated with the system evolution, such that all the blocks have almost the same number of particles. The performance of the present code is evaluated for the simulations of the current sheet evolution. The test simulations demonstrate that the usage of the adaptive block technique as well as the staggering grid scheme enhances significantly the parallel efficiency of the AMR-EMPIC model. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.