  In the context of the validation of PICLas, a kinetic particle suite for the
simulation of rarefied, non-equilibrium plasma flows, the biased hypersonic
nitrogen flow around a blunted cone was simulated with the Direct Simulation
Monte Carlo method. The setup is characterized by a complex flow with strong
local gradients and thermal non-equilibrium resulting in a highly inhomogeneous
computational load. Especially, the load distribution is of interest, because
it allows to exploit the utilized computational resources efficiently.
Different load distribution algorithms are investigated and compared within a
strong scaling. This investigation of the parallel performance of PICLas is
accompanied by simulation results in terms of the velocity magnitude,
translational temperature and heat flux, which is compared to experimental
measurements.
