Concurrent simulation of neutral flow in the GEC reference cell

This paper describes computational techniques for concurrent Direct Simulat ion Monte Carlo (DSMC) of neutral flow inside three-dimensional plasma reac tors. These techniques are designed to reduce the overall time to obtain re alistic three-dimensional results. A simulation problem is first defined by automatically generating a tetrahedral grid, This grid is statically parti tioned in order to achieve scalable memory utilization. Parallel algorithms allow high-performance multicomputer architectures to be leveraged to redu ce simulation time, Adaptive gridding techniques are employed to maintain t he desired accuracy in the presence of dynamic flow variations, Load balanc ing algorithms, based on heat diffusion, are used to maximize efficiency. F inally, automatic granularity control is used to ensure appropriate granula rity for load balancing and for maximum processor utilization. Simulation r esults are presented for a simulation of the GEC reference cell in a flow c onfiguration of industrial relevance. Performance results are presented for large-scale multicomputers, symmetric multiprocessors and networks of PCs, Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.