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High Field Plasmonics

Part of the book series: Springer Theses ((Springer Theses))

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Abstract

As in many research fields, numerical simulations play an important role in plasma physics. Indeed, plasmas are complex physical systems and in several scenarios analytical theories are of limited applicability. Numerical simulations are often required to clarify the physical processes at play in certain conditions or to prepare experimental activities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Suppose that each one of the six dimensions \(x,y,z,p_x,p_y,p_z\) is resolved with \(10^3\) grid points. Supposing that each grid node requires 4 bytes of memory (a standard single-precision float number) to be represented, the total memory requirement amounts to \({\sim }4\cdot 10^6\) Terabytes! This is approximately 4000 times the total RAM available at the top # 1 supercomputer in the world [9], as of June 2015.

  2. 2.

    Also affiliated at Politecnico di Milano when the project started.

  3. 3.

    This is often useful in order to save computational time, since in typical simulations longitudinal resolution is more critical than transversal resolution. In this case \(\Delta x\) can be smaller than \(\Delta y\) and \(\Delta z\).

  4. 4.

    These tests were performed with a 3D box completely filled with a uniform, low-temperature plasma. The simulation box was evenly split between the MPI tasks. In a weak scaling test the computational cost per MPI task is kept constant (i.e. if the number of MPI tasks is increased 2\(\times \), the simulation box is enlarged 2\(\times \)).Therefore, in the ideal case, the execution time should be the same for any number of MPI tasks. In the strong scaling tests instead, the size of the simulation box is kept constant. Thus increasing \(N{\times }\) the number of MPI tasks should lead to a \(N{\times }\) speed-up in the ideal case.

  5. 5.

    Even listing the content of a directory containing tens of thousands of files may take several seconds or tens of seconds on FERMI.

  6. 6.

    It is worth to stress that the main aim of these 2D simulations was to give an idea of the physical process at play, rather than reproducing experimental results faithfully.

  7. 7.

    The skin depth should be resolved at least with one point. As a consequence at least 50 points per \(\upmu \)m are required for 64 \(n_c\) densities. However with this resolution the 50 nm thin target would have been resolved with just 1–2 points. Thus a resolution of 120 points per \(\upmu \)m in the longitudinal direction was chosen.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Enrico Fermi Department of Physics, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Luca Fedeli

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  1. Luca Fedeli
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Correspondence to Luca Fedeli .

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Fedeli, L. (2017). Numerical Tools. In: High Field Plasmonics. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44290-7_3

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