Direct Monte Carlo Simulation of Ionized Rarefied Flows on Large MIMD Parallel Supercomputers

T. J. Bartel, S. J. Plimpton, C. R. Justiz, in Proc of 18th International Symposium on Rarefied Gas Dynamics, Vancouver, Canada, July 1992, published by AIAA, A94-30156, p 155-165.

Recently a renewed interest has been exhibited in understanding both contamination and space environmental effect in the low earth orbit range of 220-600 km as well as in low-density microelectronics manufacturing technologies. Realistic simulations must model the physics of the highly coupled effects of neutral and charged particle flows, thermodynamic non- equilibrium, surface charging, and electromagnetic field effects. The computational requirements are enormous for this level of modeling and are almost impossible to achieve on current single processor supercomputers. An effort has been initiated to develop this capability on a massively parallel multiple-instruction/multiple-data (MIMD) supercomputer. The Wake Shield Facility experiment will be used for test case calculations. Preliminary results indicate that parallel supercomputers may be the only computers capable of simulation the required level of physics and spatial resolution. Calculations which contain from 1 to 8 million particles are presented.

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