piccante is a massively parallel fully-relativistic electromagnetic 3D particle-in-cell code, released by the authors to the whole laser-plasma community under a GPLv3 license.
Its strengths are related to flexibility: the user is able to define an arbitrary number of particle species with arbitrary density functions and an arbitrary number of Gaussian laser pulses.
The code is proved to scale very well up to 32768 MPI processes.
In its present state, the code could be considered in beta status.
Copyright 2014-2016 - Andrea Sgattoni, Luca Fedeli, Stefano Sinigardi
piccante uses code from rapidjson and SOBOL. Each source files contain original copyright notice
piccante make use of functions and classes from the library boost
To build it on linux, make, a C++11 compiler, boost and MPI are required, after that a plain make should work (adapt the makefile according to your setup if needed).
On MacOS X you should use homebrew to install the same packages and then launch make brew.
On Windows, you should use the Visual Studio solution to obtain boost as a Nuget package, while you should download Microsoft MPI (with SDK) before building.
piccante should build cleanly after that
A paper that describes the technical features of piccante is under development now, in the meantime if you want to use the code please ask the authors for a ZENODO doi linked to the release you're using.
A technical paper describing optimizations performed during a Preparatory PRACE can be found here 
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A. Sgattoni, S. Sinigardi, L. Fedeli, F. Pegoraro, A. Macchi, Laser-Driven Rayleigh-Taylor Instability: Plasmonics Effects and Three-Dimensional Structures, arXiv:1404.1260, Phys. Rev. E, 91, 013106 (2015)
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A. Sgattoni, S. Sinigardi, A. Macchi, High Energy Gain in Three-Dimensional Simulations of Light Sail Acceleration, arXiv:1403.2709, Appl. Phys. Lett., 105, 084105 (2014)
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L. Fedeli, A. Sgattoni, G. Cantono, D. Garzella, F. Réau, I. Prencipe, M. Passoni, M. Raynaud, M. Květoň, J. Proska, A. Macchi, T. Ceccotti, Electron acceleration by relativistic surface plasmons in laser-grating interaction arXiv:1508.02328, [Physical Review Letters 116, 015001 (2016)] (http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.015001)
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A Sgattoni, L Fedeli, G Cantono, T Ceccotti and A Macchi, High field plasmonics and laser-plasma acceleration in solid targets Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion 58, 014004 (2015)
