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Plasma particle simulations using a special-purpose computer system for gravitational N-body problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2006

HIBINO SHINYA ,
MIZUNO YASUNORI ,
INUZUKA HIROSHI ,
CAO YONGGAO ,
LIU YAN  and
YAZAWA KENICHI
HIBINO SHINYA
Affiliation:
Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Hamamatsu 432-8561, Japan
MIZUNO YASUNORI
Affiliation:
Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Hamamatsu 432-8561, Japan
INUZUKA HIROSHI
Affiliation:
Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Hamamatsu 432-8561, Japan
CAO YONGGAO
Affiliation:
Hamamatsu Metrix Co., Ltd, 1-4-10-8 Shinmiyakoda, Hamamatsu 431-2103, Japan
LIU YAN
Affiliation:
Hamamatsu Metrix Co., Ltd, 1-4-10-8 Shinmiyakoda, Hamamatsu 431-2103, Japan
YAZAWA KENICHI
Affiliation:
Hamamatsu Metrix Co., Ltd, 1-4-10-8 Shinmiyakoda, Hamamatsu 431-2103, Japan
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Abstract

Plasma particle simulations are performed using GRAPE-6, a special-purpose computer for calculating gravitational N-body systems. GRAPE-6 rapidly calculates the gravitational force between particles using specialized pipeline processors. The peak performance of a unit of GRAPE-6 reaches 985 GFLOPS. We investigated speeding up plasma simulations through the use of GRAPE-6 for the calculation of Coulomb interactions, which have the same form of central force as the gravitational force. As an example of plasma particle simulation using GRAPE-6, we simulated the Buneman instability. As another example of plasma particle simulation, we simulated a Coulomb crystal in a dusty plasma. The formation of a Coulomb crystal was observed under typical laboratory conditions. We found that GRAPE-6 can perform the entire operation of the simulation of a Coulomb crystal with 5 × 103 particles up to 210 times faster than a 1.6-GHz Pentium4 CPU.

Type
Papers
Information
Journal of Plasma Physics , Volume 72 , Issue 6 , December 2006 , pp. 1077 - 1080
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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