IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE, VOL. 40, NO. 7, JULY 2012 1937
Brief Introduction and Recent Applications of a
Large-Scale Parallel Three-Dimensional
PIC Code Named NEPTUNE3D
Wenyuan Yang, Ye Dong, Jun Chen, Hanyu Li, Huifang Sun, Qiang Zhao,
Haijing Zhou, Zhiwei Dong, and Zeyao Mo
Abstract—This paper introduces a large-scale parallel 3-D
fully electromagnetic particle-in-cell code named Nonlinear
Evolution of Plasma-interaction Technology Under Nonneu-
tral Environment—Three Dimensional (NEPTUNE3D) developed
with the support of a parallel adaptive structured mesh applica-
tion infrastructure JASMIN. NEPTUNE3D can be used to sim-
ulate beam–wave interactions in high-power microwave (HPM)
generators. Some novel parallelization techniques are adopted
in the NEPTUNE3D code for high parallel efficiency and good
scalability. Some real-world HPM devices have been successfully
simulated by NEPTUNE3D, such as the relativistic backward
wave oscillator (RBWO), the magnetically insulated line oscil-
lator (MILO), the virtual cathode oscillator, and the relativistic
klystron amplifier. In this paper, two recent simulation examples
are presented. The first is simulations of a knife-edge cathode
RBWO, using 128 processors very efficiently. The second example
is simulations of a MILO with a plate-inserted mode-transducing
antenna, modeled using 27 million cells, 3 million particles, and
1024 processors with relatively high parallel efficiency.
Index Terms—High-power microwave (HPM), Nonlinear Evo-
lution of Plasma-interaction Technology Under Nonneutral
Environment—Three Dimensional (NEPTUNE3D), numerical
simulation, parallel, particle in cell (PIC).
I. INTRODUCTION
D
UE TO high nonlinearity during the beam–wave interac-
tion process, computational methods have been critical to
the understanding and development of high-power microwave
(HPM) tubes. By simulation, one can obtain insight into the
complex physical mechanisms involved in these devices [1].
Because it is expensive and time consuming to design HPM
tubes experimentally, validity and precision of the simulation
results are of utmost importance for the simulation codes used
during the design process.
Manuscript received October 9, 2011; revised February 7, 2012; accepted
April 9, 2012. Date of publication May 21, 2012; date of current version
July 5, 2012. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grants 10705006, 61170310, and 61033009, by the
National Basic Key Research Special Fund under Grant 2011CB309702, and by
the Science Technology Foundation of China Academy of Engineering Physics
under Grant 2009B0402046.
The authors are with the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational
Mathematics, Beijing 100088, China (e-mail: yang_wenyuan@mail.iapcm.
ac.cn; Dong_ye@iapcm.ac.cn; Chenjun@iapcm.ac.cn; li_hanyu@iapcm.ac.
cn; sun_huifang@iapcm.ac.cn; zhao_qiang@iapcm.ac.cn; zhou_haijing@
iapcm.ac.cn; Dong_zhiwei@iapcm.ac.cn; mo_zeyao@iapcm.ac.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPS.2012.2195683
Although the geometrical structures of many HPM tubes are
axially symmetrical, some HPM tubes are unsymmetrical [2]
and may have complex geometries [3]. Furthermore, among
HPM devices that are axially symmetrical in structure, the
operating mode may not be symmetrical [4], or mode com-
petition with asymmetrical modes may need to be taken into
consideration [5]. Therefore, 2-D or 2.5-D particle-in-cell (PIC)
codes are not sufficient to analyze or design HPM tubes having
such characteristics.
To meet the simulation requirements of the design process
for HPM devices, commercial PIC codes have been devel-
oped, such as MAGIC3D [6] and KARAT3D [7]. However,
compared with 2-D or 2.5-D codes, the runtime cost is much
increased with 3-D codes. For example, a simulation of a
conventional knife-edge X-band relativistic backward wave os-
cillator (RBWO) (with 4 million cells, 1.5 million particles, and
25-ns physical duration) takes several days using KARAT3D
with a dual-processor Pentium-based personal computer.
With the development of parallelization techniques and cor-
responding simulation algorithms, which take advantage of the
latest parallel high-performance computing resources, parallel
3-D codes, such as ICEPIC [8] and, more recently, UNIPIC3D
[9], have further advanced the ability to simulate HPM devices.
Because parallel 3-D codes can be run on high-performance
systems with many processors, runtime is decreased, and larger
scale simulations become possible.
Starting in 2007, we began to develop a parallel 3-D
fully electromagnetic PIC code named Nonlinear Evolu-
tion of Plasma-interaction Technology Under Nonneutral
Environment—Three Dimensional (NEPTUNE3D) with the
support of JASMIN. JASMIN is a parallel adaptive struc-
tured mesh application infrastructure [10]. It is programmed in
C++ and provides the basic parallel techniques employed by
NEPTUNE3D.
NEPTUNE3D can be used to simulate beam–wave interac-
tions in a variety of vacuum electronic devices, including HPM
generators.
Although NEPTUNE3D is still in development now, it
has successfully simulated real-world HPM devices, in-
cluding an RBWO, a magnetically insulated line oscillator
(MILO), a virtual cathode oscillator, and a relativistic klystron
amplifier [11].
Section II of this paper describes the governing equations and
basic algorithms used in NEPTUNE3D. A brief description of
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