Using Java for plasma PIC simulations

Plasma particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations model the interactions of charged particles with the surrounding fields. This application has been recognized as one of the grand challenge problems facing the high-performance computing community due to its huge computational requirements. Recently, with the explosive development of the Internet, Java is receiving increasing attention and is thought as a potential candidate for high-performance computing. In this paper, we present our approach to developing 2- and 3-dimensional parallel PIC simulations in Java. We also report the execution times for both versions from performance experiments on a symmetric multi-processor (Sun E6500) and a Linux cluster of Pentium III machines. Those results are also compared with benchmark measurements of the corresponding Fortran version of the same algorithm.