Gridless finite-size-particle plasma simulation Original Research Article

The main features of gridless finite-size-particle (FSP) codes are discussed, from the point of view of the performances that can be obtained, with respect both to the spatial-resolution level and the efficiency of parallel particle simulations. It is shown that such codes are particularly suited for particle-decomposition parallelization on distributed-memory architectures, as they present a strong reduction, in comparison with particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, of the memory overhead related to storing the replicated fluctuating-field arrays.