Irregular Computation in Plasma Modeling

Brief Summary

This chapter describes irregularity in plasma computation and discusses how object-oriented techniques can be introduced to address this problem. The forms of irregularity in plasma simulation are unusual and quite different from other applications given the structure of the PIC algorithm. Since modification of simulation parameters can cause experiments to require load balancing, handling irregularity is necessary for extension to new problems. An implicit monitoring technique, which is an object-oriented approach used in instrumenting programs to address load imbalance, is described in the context of the collisionless free-expansion and gravitational experiments.