A parallel electrostatic solver for XOOPIC code

We report on the implementation of a parallel electrostatic field solver in the plasma particle simulation code XOOPIC1. Poisson's equation is solved by finite differences in real space, using iterative methods to solve a large sparse system of linear equations. Domain decomposition is extended to two dimensions, including particle passing and electrostatic field solution. We utilize Trilinos solvers for our implementation. In particular AZTEC, a set of iterative solvers, preconditioners and matrix-vector multiplication routines, and ML, a multigrid preconditioning package, from Sandia National Lab are used2. These libraries are optimized for a range of highly parallel platforms and are expected to be highly efficient and scalable to more than 1000 processors. Accuracy of the solver is compared to analytic results, and performance scaling is measured.