Parallel particle-in-cell Monte-Carlo algorithm for simulation of gas discharges under PVM and MPI

The simulation of complex problems in the field of plasma deposition technology requires the usage of parallel code running on modern multicore architectures. The inhouse developed Particle-in-Cell Monte-Carlo (PIC-MC) simulation environment has recently been ported from PVM towards MPI, which is the de-facto standard for parallelization by message passing. We measured a shorter latency time of MPI in comparison with PVM and determined the impact on the PIC-MC performance.