We have implemented a 2D electrostastic plasma particle in cell (PIC) simulation code on the Caltech/JPL Mark IIIfp Hypercube. The code simulates plasma effects by evolving in time the trajectories of thousands to millions of charged particles subject to their self-consistent fields. Each particle`s position and velocity is advanced in time using a leap frog method for integrating Newton`s equations of motion in electric and magnetic fields. The electric field due to these moving charged particles is calculated on a spatial grid at each time by solving Poisson`s equation in Fourier space. These two tasks represent the largest part of the computation. To obtain efficient operation on a distributed memory parallel computer, we are using the General Concurrent PIC (GCPIC) algorithm previously developed for a 1D parallel PIC code.

Dynamic load balancing has been implemented in a concurrent one-dimensional electromagnetic plasma particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation code using a method which adds very little overhead to the parallel code. In PIC codes, the orbits of many interacting plasma electrons and ions are followed as an initial value problem as the particles move in electromagnetic fields calculated self-consistently from the particle motions. The code was implemented using the GCPIC algorithm in which the particles are divided among processors by partitioning the spatial domain of the simulation. The problem is load-balanced by partitioning the spatial domain so that each partition has approximately the same number of particles. During the simulation, the partitions are dynamically recreated as the spatial distribution of the particles changes in order to maintain processor load balance.