A parallel electrostatic solver for the VORPAL code

Abstract

Here we report on the addition of a parallel electrostatic (ES) field solver to the hybrid plasma simulation code VORPAL. Poisson's equation is solved by finite differences in real space. The large sparse system of linear equations is solved by iterative methods, like Krylov subspace algorithms and algebraic multigrid (AMG). Utilizing solver libraries optimized for parallel platforms (AZTEC and ML, both developed at Sandia National Labs) results in good overall performance of the solver. Accuracy of the solver is compared to analytical results for examples relevant to electron-cooling problems.