Domain cloning for a particle-in-cell (PIC) code on a cluster of symmetric-multiprocessor (SMP) computers

In 2000, a new approach to parallelization, domain cloning, was presented by [C.C. Kim, S.E. Parker, Massively parallel three-dimensional toroidal gyrokinetic flux-tube turbulence simulation, Journal of Computational Physics 161 (2000) 589–604]. Domain cloning is an additional layer of parallelization, a supplement to one-dimensional domain decomposition which gives the opportunity to optimize the scaling properties of certain particle-in-cell codes. A further adaptation to a cluster of symmetric-multiprocessor computers is presented in this work. Hence, very good scaling properties up to 2048 processors could be achieved for a particle-in-cell code surpassing the Tflop/s performance threshold.