Aleph

Abstract

Aleph is a PIC/DSMC (particle-in-cell/direct simulation Monte Carlo) software package for the simulation of low temperature plasmas. Aleph is intended to be a production quality code capable of handling complex 3D geometries. Unstructured triangular (2D) or tetrahedral (3D) meshes are used to represent simulation domains. Aleph runs either in serial on a single processor or desktop machine, or can be run in parallel using the MPI message-passing library, to enable faster performance on large problems. Aleph employs dynamic load balancing to efficiently harness thousands of processors on high performance computers and enable simulations of up to millions of mesh elements and billions of particles. Multiple decompositions of the same mesh are used: one for the particles, and one for the field solves. Electrostatic fields are computed using an unstructured mesh finite element method (FEM), and the resulting linear systems are solved using solvers from the Trilinos package (http://trilinos.org/).