PICSARlite

PICSARlite is part of the WarpX, a software package for exascale modeling of plasma-based particle accelerators. Its goal is to assist the development of compact and affordable high-energy physics colliders.

The components of WarpX are:

  • PICSAR: a library of Fortran 90 subroutines for Particle-In-Cell (PIC) operations.
  • AMReX: a software framework written in C++ and Fortran 90 for massively parallel, block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) applications, including ExaSky, Combustion-Pele, ExaStar, and MFIX-Exa as well as other ECP applications.
  • WarpX-Source: a C++ driver and set of subroutines for interfacing with PICSAR and AMReX. The PICSAR library includes a stand-alone driver that can be used instead of WarpX-Source to call PICSAR subroutines without AMReX, if mesh refinement is not needed.

PICSARlite is a trimmed down version of PICSAR (including its stand-alone driver) that is generated from the PICSAR code by running a script that selects only a subset of the options available in PICSAR for particle pusher, deposition, Maxwell solver, etc. The purpose of PICSARlite is to have a smaller code to work with (19,702 lines, vs.~70,181 lines for the full PICSAR) while maintaining essential functionality.