On Architecture and Performance of Adaptive Mesh Refinement in an Electrostatics Particle-In-Cell Code

Abstract: This article presents a hardware architecture independent implementation of an adaptive mesh refinement Poisson solver that is integrated into the electrostatic Particle-In-Cell beam dynamics code OPAL. The Poisson solver is solely based on second generation Trilinos packages to ensure the desired hardware portability. Based on the massively parallel framework AMReX, formerly known as BoxLib, the new adaptive mesh refinement interface provides several refinement policies in order to enable precise large-scale neighbouring bunch simulations in high intensity cyclotrons. The solver is validated with a built-in multigrid solver of AMReX and a test problem with analytical solution. The parallel scalability is presented as well as an example of a neighbouring bunch simulation that covers the scale of the later anticipated physics simulation.