The energy and centrality dependencies of charged particle pseudorapidity density in relativistic nuclearcollisions were studied using a hadron and string cascade model, JPCIAE. Both the relativistic p+p experimental dataand the PHOBOS and PHENIX Au+Au data at RHIC energy could be fairly reproduced within the framework ofJPCIAE model and without retuning the model parameters. The predictions for Pb + Pb collisions at the LHC energywere also given. We computed the participant nucleon distributions using different methods. It was found that thenumber of participant nucleons is not a well defined variable both experimentally and theoretically. Thus it may beinappropriate to use the charged particle pseudorapidity density per participant pair .as a function of the number ofparticipant nucleons for distinguishing various theoretical models.