MPI implementation of a generalized implicit algorithm for multi-dimensional PIC simulations

The implicit 2D3V particle-in-cell (PIC) code developed to study the interaction of short pulse lasers with matter [G. M. Petrov and J. Davis, Computer Phys. Comm. 179, 868 (2008); Phys. Plasmas 18, 073102 (2011)] has been parallelized using MPI (Message Passing Interface). Performance evaluation has been made on a Linux cluster for two typical regimes of PIC operation: ``particle dominated,'' for which the bulk of the computation time is spent on pushing particles, and ``field dominated,'' for which computing the fields is prevalent. The MPI implementation of the code offers a significant numerical speedup, particularly in the ``particle dominated'' regime, which will allow extension to three dimensions and implementation of atomic physics.