Gridless finite-size-particle plasma simulation

The main features of gridless finite-size-particle (FSP) codes are discusse d, from the point of view of the performances that can be obtained, with re spect both to the spatial-resolution level and the efficiency of parallel p article simulations. It is shown that such codes are particularly suited fo r particle-decomposition parallelization on distributed-memory architecture s, as they present a strong reduction, in comparison with particle in-cell (PIC) codes, of the memory overhead related to storing the replicated fluct uating field arrays. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.