A 2D electrostatic PIC code for the Mark III Hypercube

In this paper, the authors have implemented a 2D electrostatic plasma particle in cell (PIC) simulation code on the Caltech/JPL Mark IIIfp Hypercube. The code simulates plasma effects by evolving in time the trajectories of thousands to millions of charged particles subject to their self-consistent fields. Each particle's position and velocity is advanced in time using a leap frog method for integrating Newton's equations of motion in electric and magnetic fields. The Electric field due to these moving charged particles is calculated on a spatial grid at each time step by solving Poisson's equation in Fourier space. These two tasks represent the largest part of the computation