A distributed particle simulation code in C++

Although C++ has been successfully used in a variety of computer science applications, it has just recently begun to be used in scientific applications. We have found that the object-oriented properties of C++ lend themselves well to scientific computations by making maintenance of the code easier, by making the code easier to understand, and by providing a better paradigm for distributed memory parallel codes. We describe here aspects of developing a particle plasma simulation code using object-oriented techniques for use in a distributed computing environment. We initially designed and implemented the code for serial computation and then used the distributed programming toolkit ISIS to run it in parallel. In this connection we describe some of the difficulties presented by using C++ for doing parallel and scientific computation