PICPANTHER: A simple, concise implementation of the relativistic moment implicit Particle-in-Cell method

TL;DR

PICPANTHER is a streamlined, parallelized C++ implementation of a relativistic particle-in-cell method that emphasizes simplicity, efficiency, and scalability for large-scale electromagnetic plasma simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a concise, user-friendly C++11 codebase for the relativistic implicit particle-in-cell method with demonstrated scalability and performance.

Findings

Effective weak scaling on SuperMUC system

Suitable for large-scale production runs

Validated through multiple test simulations

Abstract

A three-dimensional, parallelized implementation of the electromagnetic relativistic moment implicit particle-in-cell method in Cartesian geometry (Noguchi et. al., 2007) is presented. Particular care was taken to keep the C++11 codebase simple, concise, and approachable. GMRES is used as a field solver and during the Newton-Krylov iteration of the particle pusher. Drifting Maxwellian problem setups are available while more complex simulations can be implemented easily. Several test runs are described and the code's numerical and computational performance is examined. Weak scaling on the SuperMUC system is discussed and found suitable for large-scale production runs.