SpectralPlasmaSolver: a Spectral Code for Multiscale Simulations of Collisionless, Magnetized Plasmas

We present the design and implementation of a spectral code, called SpectralPlasmaSolver (SPS), for the solution of the multi-dimensional Vlasov-Maxwell equations. The method is based on a Hermite-Fourier decomposition of the particle distribution function. The code is written in Fortran and uses the PETSc library for solving the non-linear equations and preconditioning and the FFTW library for the convolutions. SPS is parallelized for shared- memory machines using OpenMP. As a verification example, we discuss simulations of the two-dimensional Orszag-Tang vortex problem and successfully compare them against a fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell simulation. An assessment of the performance of the code is presented, showing a significant improvement in the code running-time achieved by preconditioning, while strong scaling tests show a factor of 10 speed-up using 16 threads.