Particle-in-Cell Simulation Codes in High Performance Fortran

Particle-in-Cell (PIC) plasma simulation codes model the interaction of charged particles with surrounding electrostatic and magnetic fields. PIC´s computational requirements are classified at as one of the grand-challenge problems facing the high-performance community. In this paper we present the implementation of 1-D and 2-D electrostatic PIC codes in High Performance Fortran (HPF) on an IBM SP-2. We used one of the most successful commercial HPF compilers currently available and augmented the compiler´s missing HPF functions with extrinsic routines when necessary. We obtained a near linear speed-up in execution time and a performance comparable to the native message-passing implementations on the same platform.