Hermite spline interpolation on patches for parallelly solving the Vlasov-poisson equation

Abstract

This work is devoted to the numerical simulation of the Vlasov equation using a phase space grid. In contrast to Particle-In-Cell (PIC) methods, which are known to be noisy, we propose a semi-Lagrangian-type method to discretize the Vlasov equation in the two-dimensional phase space. As this kind of method requires a huge computational effort, one has to carry out the simulations on parallel machines. For this purpose, we present a method using patches decomposing the phase domain, each patch being devoted to a processor. Some Hermite boundary conditions allow for the reconstruction of a good approximation of the global solution. Several numerical results demonstrate the accuracy and the good scalability of the method with up to 64 processors. This work is a part of the CALVI project.