SpectralPlasmaSolver: a Spectral Code for Multiscale Simulations of Collisionless, Magnetized Plasmas

10th International Conference on Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows: ASTRONUM-2015

Vencels, Juris^1 ; Delzanno, Gian Luca^1 ; Manzini, Gianmarco^1 ; Markidis, Stefano^1 ; Peng, Ivy Bo^2 ; Roytershteyn, Vadim^3

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos

NM, United States^1

KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden^2

Space Science Institute, Boulder

CO, United States^3

关键词: Design and implementations;    Fourier decomposition;    Magnetized plasmas;    Multi-scale simulation;    Particle distribution functions;    Particle-in-cell simulations;    Shared memory machines;    Vlasov-Maxwell equations;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/719/1/012022/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/719/1/012022

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

We present the design and implementation of a spectral code, called SpectralPlasmaSolver (SPS), for the solution of the multi-dimensional Vlasov-Maxwell equations. The method is based on a Hermite-Fourier decomposition of the particle distribution function. The code is written in Fortran and uses the PETSc library for solving the non-linear equations and preconditioning and the FFTW library for the convolutions. SPS is parallelized for shared- memory machines using OpenMP. As a verification example, we discuss simulations of the two-dimensional Orszag-Tang vortex problem and successfully compare them against a fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell simulation. An assessment of the performance of the code is presented, showing a significant improvement in the code running-time achieved by preconditioning, while strong scaling tests show a factor of 10 speed-up using 16 threads.