A Parallel Implementation of Particle Tracking with Space Charge Effects on an Intel iPSC/860

Article type: Research Article

Authors: CHANG, L. | BOURIANOFF, G. | COLE, B. | MACHIDA, S.

Affiliations: Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory, *2550 Beckleymeade Avenue, Dallas, TX 75237

Abstract: Particle-tracking simulation is one of the scientific applications that is well suited to parallel computations. At the Superconducting Super Collider, it has been theoretically and empirically demonstrated that particle tracking on a designed lattice can achieve very high parallel efficiency on a MIMD Intel iPSC/860 machine. The key to such success is the realization that the particles can be tracked independently without considering their interaction. The perfectly parallel nature of particle tracking is broken if the interaction effects between particles are included. The space charge introduces an electromagnetic force that will affect the motion of tracked particles in three-dimensional (3-D) space. For accurate modeling of the beam dynamics with space charge effects, one needs to solve 3-D Maxwell field equations, usually by a particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm. This will require each particle to communicate with its neighbor grids to compute the momentum changes at each time step. It is expected that the 3-D PIC method will degrade parallel efficiency of particle-tracking implementation on any parallel computer. In this paper, we describe an efficient scheme for implementing particle tracking with space charge effects on an INTEL iPSC/860 machine. Experimental results show that a parallel efficiency of 75% can be obtained.

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 37-47, 1993