A Kinetic Vlasov Model for Plasma Simulation Using Discontinuous Galerkin Method on Many-Core Architectures

Advances are reported in the three pillars of computational science achieving a new capability for understanding dynamic plasma phenomena outside of local thermodynamic equilibrium.;A continuum kinetic model for plasma based on the Vlasov-Maxwell system for multiple particle species is developed. Consideration is added for boundary conditions in a truncated velocity domain and supporting wall interactions. A scheme to scale the velocity domain for multiple particle species with different temperatures and particle mass while sharing one computational mesh is described. A method for assessing the degree to which the kinetic solution differs from a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is introduced and tested on a thoroughly studied test case.;The discontinuous Galerkin numerical method is extended for efficient solution of hyperbolic conservation laws in five or more particle phase-space dimensions using tensor-product hypercube elements with arbitrary polynomial order. A scheme for velocity moment integration is integrated as required for coupling between the plasma species and electromagnetic waves.;A new high performance simulation code WARPM is developed to efficiently implement the model and numerical method on emerging many-core supercomputing architectures. WARPM uses the OpenCL programming model for computational kernels and task parallelism to overlap computation with communication. WARPM single-node performance and parallel scaling efficiency are analyzed with bottlenecks identified guiding future directions for the implementation.;The plasma modeling capability is validated against physical problems with analytic solutions and well established benchmark problems.