MPI-AMRVAC for Solar and Astrophysics

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.