MPI-amrvac for solar and astrophysics

Abstract

In this paper, we present an update to the open source MPI-AMRVAC simulation toolkit where we focus on solar and non-relativistic astrophysical magnetofluid 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 with the example of monotonicity-preserving fifth-order reconstruction. Strong stability-preserving high-order Runge-Kutta time steppers are used to obtain stable evolutions in multi-dimensional 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 toward follow-up research. Finally, we discuss the parallel scaling of the code and demonstrate excellent weak scaling up to 30, 000 processors, allowing us to exploit modern peta-scale infrastructure.