OSIRIS.FRAMEWORK: an integrated tool for modeling astrophysical and laboratory plasmas

Abstract

We describe the osiris.framework [1], a general purpose, three-dimensional, fully relativistic, massively parallel, object oriented particle-in-cell code for the numerical simulation of astrophysical and laboratory plasmas, complemented by a set of specially designed visualization tools [2]. Developed in Fortran 95, the code runs on multiple platforms (Cray T3E, IBM SP, Beowulf, Mac clusters) and can be easily ported to new ones. Details on the code’s capabilities are given. We discuss the object-oriented design of the code, the encapsulation of system dependent code and the parallelization of the algorithms involved. We also discuss the implementation of communications as a boundary condition problem and also load balancing, as well as other key characteristics of the code, such as the moving window, open-space and thermal bath boundaries, arbitrary domain decomposition, 1D (cartesian), 2D (cartesian and cylindrical) and 3D geometry, ion sub-cycling, tunnel and impact ionization and diagnostics. Finally results from three-dimensional simulations are presented, in connection with the data analysis and visualization infrastructure developed to post-process the scalar and vector results from PIC simulations.