Parallelization of Space Plasma Particle Simulation

Yutaka Akiyama(1), Kiyotaka Misoo(2), Yoshiharu Omura(3),
Hiroshi Matsumoto(3), Minoru Saito(1), Tamotsu Noguchi(1),
Kentaro Onizuka(1), and Makoto Ando(1)

This paper describes parallelization of the space plasma particle simulation program ``KEMPO1'' and shows its performance on five different platforms.
One of our goals is to solve the Electrostatic Solitary Wave (ESW) problem by intensive computer simulations, which previously took about 1 month for a single experiment (10^7 particles, 10^4 time steps).
The parallelized version performs the same calculation in 3 hours and a bigger one (2.7 * 10^8 particles, 1.6 * 10^4 time steps) in about 8 hours on our 256-processor Hitachi SR2201 parallel computer. It has made systematic real-world space plasma particle simulations feasible.
(1) Parallel Application TRC Laboratory, Tsukuba Research Center, Real World Computing Partnership, Tsukuba Mitsui Building 16F, 1-6-1 Takezono, Tsukuba 305, Japan
(2) Information and Mathematical Science Laboratory, Inc, 2-43-1 Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku 171, Japan
(3) Radio Atmospheric Science Center, Kyoto University, Gokasho, Uji 611, Japan