Abstract:

The PIC (Particle-In-Cell) method is widely used in computational plasma physics. However, a large number of computational particles have to be simulated in order to get high accuracy, which requires great compute capacity. Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate the PIC method in order to reduce the time cost. A NVIDIA Kepler GPU based PIC algorithm is designed and implemented using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). The most time consuming parts of PIC method, namely collision and mover, are ported onto GPU platform. In our experiments, NVIDIA's newly released Kepler K20 is used to evaluate the performance and maximum 30x speedup is achieved compared with Intel Sandy Bridge E5-2650.

Key words: PIC method;CUDA;NVIDIA Kepler