A NVIDA Kepler Based Acceleration of PIC Method

The particle-in-cell (PIC) method has been widely used in computational plasma physics. However, a large number of computational particles need to be simulated in order to get high accuracy, which demands for a great compute capacity. Therefor it becomes necessary to accelerate the PIC method to reduce the time cost. In this paper, we design a GPU-based PIC algorithm and implement it using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). The most time consuming parts of PIC method, namely collision and mover, are ported to GPU platform. In our experiments, NVIDIA's newly released Kepler K20 is used to evaluate the performance and for both collision and mover, over 10x speedup is achieved compared with Intel Sandy Bridge E5-2650.