This report documents the outcome from the ASC ATDM Level 2 Milestone 6358: Assess Status of Next Generation Components and Physics Models in EMPIRE. This Milestone is an assessment of the EMPIRE (ElectroMagnetic Plasma In Realistic Environments) application and three software components. The assessment focuses on the electromagnetic and electrostatic particle-in-cell solu- tions for EMPIRE and its associated solver, time integration, and checkpoint-restart components. This information provides a clear understanding of the current status of the EMPIRE application and will help to guide future work in FY19 in order to ready the application for the ASC ATDM L 1 Milestone in FY20. It is clear from this assessment that performance of the linear solver will have to be a focus in FY19.
Multiple physical time-scales can arise in electromagnetic simulations when dissipative effects are introduced through boundary conditions, when currents follow external time-scales, and when material parameters vary spatially. In such scenarios, the time-scales of interest may be much slower than the fastest time-scales supported by the Maxwell equations, therefore making implicit time integration an efficient approach. The use of implicit temporal discretizations results in linear systems in which fast time-scales, which severely constrain the stability of an explicit method, can manifest as so-called stiff modes. This study proposes a new block preconditioner for structure preserving (also termed physics compatible) discretizations of the Maxwell equations in first order form. The intent of the preconditioner is to enable the efficient solution of multiple-time-scale Maxwell type systems. An additional benefit of the developed preconditioner is that it requires only a traditional multigrid method for its subsolves and compares well against alternative approaches that rely on specialized edge-based multigrid routines that may not be readily available. Results demonstrate parallel scalability at large electromagnetic wave CFL numbers on a variety of test problems.
In this work we present a computational capability featuring a hierarchy of models with different fidelities for the solution of electrokinetics problems at the micro-/nano-scale. A multifidelity approach allows the selection of the most appropriate model, in terms of accuracy and computational cost, for the particular application at hand. We demonstrate the proposed multifidelity approach by studying the mobility of a colloid in a micro-channel as a function of the colloid charge and of the size of the ions dissolved in the fluid.