Parallelization of XPDP1 Code for Technology Applications of Plasmas

This work presents the main steps towards a parallel version of the PIC (Particle In Cell) code XPDP1 (X Plasma Device Planar 1-Dimensional), which uses a Monte Carlo procedure to treat collisions among the particles of different species of neutral and ionized pure gases such as argon, oxygen and others. The graphical interface of XPDP1 has been removed and it was parallelized by means of a hybrid approach, with message-passing for distributed memory (using MPI) and shared memory (using OpenMP). The tests for the efficiency and speedup were carried out on a hybrid homogeneous cluster and the results obtained show speedups of approximately ten for 32 cores on 4 servers, which allows the use of this code on problems which are infeasible with the serial version.