Technical Features of VORPAL

Built using cutting-edge simulation design and programming

VORPAL is a software product for performing relativistic, hybrid plasma and beam simulation using cutting-edge software design and programming. Notable features include:

Written in object-oriented C++ for maximum performance
1D, 2D and 3D parallel electromagnetic and simulation of charged fluids and particles are all easy to do using VORPAL's structured grid.
VORPAL includes utilities for data analysis and scripts for data visualization for OpenDX, IDL, and Python.

Scalable

VORPAL has been designed as a parallel code, but can also be run in serial. Its powerful domain decomposition algorithms, checkpoint capabilities, and the use of standard data formats enable VORPAL to execute complex plasma simulations on thousands of processors.

VORPAL is designed to run as both a serial code for single- processor workstations and as a parallel code for systems that support MPI. Domain decomposition techniques employed in the code enable static and dynamic load balancing. Scaling on several thousands of processors has been achieved for VORPAL simulations (see graphic). The use of parallel I/O enables high performance even if gigabytes of data are dumped by thousands of processors. Checkpoint and restarting capabilities enable the continuation of long running simulations even if they are limited by computing center usage policies.

Powerful

VORPAL runs on typical laptop and workstation hardware and supports Linux (32-bit, 64-bit), IBM SP running AIX, Mac OS X (Intel), and Windows (serial version only). For support of other platforms, please contact Tech-X Corporation. Researchers working with different hardware and operating systems can share input files, greatly facilitating rapid collaboration. The data dump/restore files are also binary compatible across hardware using the HDF5 file format. Hence, the results of a long simulation on a dedicated high-performance Linux cluster, for example, can be copied to a laptop running Linux, Microsoft Windows, or Mac OS X for further study.