MPI-AMRVAC for Solar and Astrophysics

TL;DR

MPI-AMRVAC is an advanced, open-source simulation toolkit for solar and astrophysical magneto-fluid dynamics, featuring high-order schemes, new physics modules, and excellent scalability on petascale supercomputers.

Contribution

The paper introduces new physics modules, high-order numerical schemes, and demonstrates MPI-AMRVAC's scalability for large-scale astrophysical simulations.

Findings

Successful implementation of high-order finite difference schemes.

Effective parallel scaling up to 30,000 processors.

Versatile physics modules for solar and astrophysical applications.

Abstract

In this paper we present an update on the open source MPI-AMRVAC simulation toolkit where we focus on solar- and non-relativistic astrophysical magneto-fluid dynamics. We highlight recent developments in terms of physics modules such as hydrodynamics with dust coupling and the conservative implementation of Hall magnetohydrodynamics. A simple conservative high-order finite difference scheme that works in combination with all available physics modules is introduced and demonstrated at the example of monotonicity preserving fifth order reconstruction. Strong stability preserving high order Runge-Kutta time steppers are used to obtain stable evolutions in multidimensional applications realizing up to fourth order accuracy in space and time. With the new distinction between active and passive grid cells, MPI-AMRVAC is ideally suited to simulate evolutions where parts of the solution are controlled analytically, or have a tendency to progress into or out of a stationary state. Typical test problems and representative applications are discussed, with an outlook to follow-up research. Finally, we discuss the parallel scaling of the code and demonstrate excellent weak scaling up to 30 000 processors allowing to exploit modern petascale infrastructure.