Massively parallel microscopic particle-in-cell

The microscopic particle-in-cell (MicPIC) method was developed to model classical light-matter interaction in strongly-coupled plasma systems. It effectively overcomes the limitations of the particle-in-cell and molecular dynamics techniques by combining them into a single, unified framework to solve for both electromagnetic wave propagation and atomic-scale collision processes in a self-consistent treatment. Its effective time complexity is O(N), where N is the number of model particles, which is ideal for studying the dynamics of large ensembles. In this paper, we show that through massively parallel, distributed computations, current implementations of the MicPIC approach can handle up to 1011 particles on an IBM Blue Gene/Q computer with 65 536 physical cores. This allows modelling volumes of matter of approximately 1μm3 at solid gold density, opening a wealth of potential applications of MicPIC in nanophotonics, diffractive X-ray imaging, and strong-field science.