A Parallel Pic Code for a Hall Thruster Simulation

Fluid codes are widely used to model Hall thrusters because of their simplicity and low computational demands. However, they have not been successful in describing all the physics of Hall thrusters. On the other hand, PIC codes (Particle In Cell) are powerful for simulating microscopic phenomena. Their drawback is the requirement in the number of particles in order to achieve good results. This implies stronger computational resources and longer runs. We have been developing a parallel PIC code for simulating a Hall thruster, able to run on a cluster of computers. This code is able to simulate a two-dimensional model of a Hall thruster with more than 100 millions particles and 1000 x 1000 cells on the cluster installed at IST. This paper describes the architecture of the code and its implementation on our cluster.