Distributed plasma simulation using C++ and ESP

Particle in Cell codes have long been the mainstay of kinetic plasma simulation. However, they have traditionally performed poorly on vector supercomputers because of the gather/scatter required for charge weighting and force interpolation. Furthermore, development of full featured codes with the flexibility and power desired for NTP simulations is difficult in Fortran. Using the Extensible Software Platform, an enhanced C++ environment for distributed computation, the authors developed a sample 1 dimensional electrostatic PIC code. The authors describe the ESP environment, emphasizing its support for distributed asynchronous computing using the concept of a future. They further discuss the implementation of the PIC code in this environment, its performance and the impact of the ESP programming model on the portability of the code