Vorpal v3.0 from Tech-X for Plasma Simulations

Tech-X Corporation has released Vorpal v3.0, which is a software framework that enables plasma simulations composed of particles and fluids for 1D, 2D, and 3D geometries.

Boulder, CO based Tech-X Corporation was founded in 1994 by John R. Cary, CEO and Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado and Svetlana Shasharina, Ph.D. and Vice-President of Distributed Technologies. The company combines object-oriented software, distributed technologies, simulation and modeling, and massively parallel computing expertise to assist customers in solving the most difficult scientific problems.

VORPAL enables researchers to simulate complex physical phenomena in less time and at a much lower cost than empirically testing process changes for plasma and vapor deposition processes. VORPAL offers a unique combination of physical models to cover the entire range of plasma simulation problems. Laser wakefield accelerators, plasma thrusters, high-power microwave guides, and plasma processing chambers are a few of the many applications benefiting from the powerful, parallel algorithms incorporated into the VORPAL framework. Ionization and neutral gas models enable VORPAL to bridge the gap between plasma and neutral flow physics.

The software runs on a wide range of computing platforms, from desktop machines to massively parallel supercomputers with thousands of processors. The use of standard data formats allows data analysis at various levels of sophistication, including your own preferred data analysis tool.

New capabilities in its latest version will allow researchers to apply Vorpal in new application areas and enable more advanced simulations of the physics being studied. These include a graphical user interface for input file creation/validation, support for non-uniform and non-Cartesian coordinate grids, new, improved computational techniques, better post-processing support, and improved diagnostics and documentation.

VORPAL simulation of an electron beam propagating in the superconducting Tesla cavity. Particle color (and diameter) represents the transverse energy. The isosurfaces represent the longitudinal electric field. [Image courtesy: Tech-X]

The kinetic plasma model incorporated in VORPAL is based on the particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm both in the electromagnetic and electrostatic limit. In the electromagnetic case, a charge conserving current deposition algorithm enables the integration of Maxwell's equations without any additional divergence cleaning. In the electrostatic limit, Poisson's equation is solved at every timestep based on the instantaneous charge distribution. The plasma can be confined in arbitrary shaped structures for particles and fields, including conductors, particle absorbers, reflectors, and many more. The computational domain can be periodic or mimic infinity via perfectly matched layer boundary conditions.

For details, visit VORPAL webpage.

Agilent's Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS)

Agilent’s Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS) allows for efficient modeling, optimization and verification of complex antennas and helps reduce design cycle risks. This far field plot of a 25x25 patch array antenna was generated using AMDS 2007.05 [Image courtesy: Agilent Technologies © 2008]

Modeling, simulating and optimizing complex antenna systems is an intricate process that includes setting up layout and simulation parameters and mathematical post-processing of the simulation results. Due to the time-consuming nature of placing and analyzing many elements in a system, designers frequently simplify simulations and use external tools to perform the necessary computations. This process is cumbersome and introduces design risk.

To address these problems, Agilent Technologies Inc. today announced the availability of its latest Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS) release. The full-wave 3-D electromagnetic (EM) modeling and simulation software contains a scripting feature for performance optimization and automation of complex designs such as patch array antennas, allowing designers to fine tune antennas for the best performance within electronic devices, such as handheld wireless cell phones.

AMDS is a full-wave, 3-D EM design, modeling and verification tool dedicated to antenna and antenna systems design. It meshes, simulates and optimizes an entire wireless device, together with its surrounding real-world environment, to analyze compliance standards such as HAC, SAR (Specific Absorption Rate), and antenna diversity and MIMO (Multiple-Input, Multiple Output). Simulating devices with AMDS can reduce design cycle time by up to 75% compared with that required by other types of EM simulators available today, the company claimed.

The new 'Python'*-based scripting capability in this 5th release of AMDS allows designers to write their own programs to automate element placement and incorporate mathematical functions to perform virtually any analysis on the antenna design before it is integrated into the complete mobile wireless device. Designers also can use equations to define the geometry of complex antennas (such as those with fractal and conformal surfaces) to optimize performance. With changes to the script, designs can be quickly and efficiently optimized and verified long before the entire phone is available for either simulation or physical testing.

For more details, visit Agilent's AMDS webpage.

*Python is a popular open-source object-oriented programming language that supports integration with other languages and tools, and comes with extensive libraries.

Seismic Data Acceleration Software from Acceleware

Calgary, Canada based Acceleware develops and markets acceleration products that bring performance and speed to today's most strenuous and challenging computational and/or data-intensive demands.

With Acceleware's products, reduction in run times for data processing and simulation applications by more than 35 times has been observed. The company's Accelerator™ Board and ClusterInABox™ Workstation solutions deliver a competitive advantage for companies where compute and data-intensive applications are central to the performance of product development cycles by radically enhancing the ability to effectively interpret vast amounts of data. The company's target markets include names in mainly following industries : electromagnetic, energy, biomedical, pharmaceuticals, industrial, and military.

Last week, Acceleware has launched its seismic data acceleration software that reduces processing times and delivers faster results when the oil and gas industry are making drilling decisions. The software harnesses the parallel processing capabilities of GPU accelerators to increase the efficiency of data centres and reduce total cost of IT ownership.

This technique is designed for 2D and 3D land and marine data where a typical processing job can compute from several days to months and solves a major bottleneck in the seismic processing industry today. Migration is the most common seismic data processing method used to recover subsurface images of the Earth’s interior using surface-recorded data volumes obtained from seismic reflection surveys.

By accelerating the computations involved in seismic migration, the software can achieve denser packaging and improved economics in power and cooling. The software has already been installed and field tested with a number of commercial data processing vendors on a variety of land and marine surveys.

For more details, visit Acceleware webpage for its products.