Body-fitted electromagnetic PIC software for use on parallel computers Original Research Article

This paper describes the algorithm and implementation issues for the three-dimensional body-fitted Particle-In-Cell (PIC) software suite 3DPIC for modelling the time evolution of interactions between electromagnetic (EM) fields and flows of relativistic charged particles. 3DPIC is applicable to EM calculations in complex geometries where displacement fields are important, and was developed specifically for microwave device modelling. A description is given of the physical model, the numerical scheme and the software. The software was designed to run efficiently on both serial and distributed-memory parallel computers. The performance achieved by the software on parallel computers demonstrates the potential of this code for large scale time-dependent electromagnetic and electrodynamic calculations.