Sum Currents

This plugin computes the total current integrated/added over the entire volume simulated.

.cfg file

The plugin can be activated by setting a non-zero value with the command line flag --sumcurr.period. The value set with --sumcurr.period is the periodicity, at which the total current is computed. E.g. --sumcurr.period 100 computes and prints the total current for time step 0, 100, 200, ….

Memory Complexity

Accelerator

negligible.

Host

negligible.

Output

The result is printed to standard output. Therefore, it goes both to ./simOutput/output as well as to the output file specified by the machine used (usually the stdout file in the main directory of the simulation). The output is ASCII-text only. It has the following format:

[ANALYSIS] [_rank] [COUNTER] [SumCurrents] [_currentTimeStep] {_current.x _current.y _current.z} Abs:_absCurrent

Value	Description	Unit
`_rank`	MPI rank at which prints the particle position	none
`_currentTimeStep`	simulation time step = number of PIC cycles	none
`_current.x` `_current.y` `_current.z`	electric current	Ampere per second
`_absCurrent`	magnitude of current	Ampere per second

In order to extract only the total current information from the output stored in stdout, the following command on a bash command line could be used:

grep SumCurrents stdout > totalCurrent.dat

The plugin data is then stored in totalCurrent.dat.

Known Limitations

this plugin is only available with the CUDA backend

Known Issues

Currently, both output and stdout are overwritten at restart. All data from the plugin is lost, if these file are not backuped manually.