Application of PDSLin to the magnetic reconnection problem

Abstract

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process in a magnetized plasma at both low and high magnetic Lundquist numbers (the ratio of the resistive diffusion time to the Alfven wave transit time), which occurs in a wide variety of laboratory and space plasmas, e.g. magnetic fusion experiments, the solar corona and the Earth's magnetotail. An implicit time advance for the two-fluid magnetic reconnection problem is known to be difficult because of the large condition number of the associated matrix. This is especially troublesome when the collisionless ion skin depth is large so that the Whistler waves, which cause the fast reconnection, dominate the physics (Yuan et al 2012 J. Comput. Phys. 231 5822–53). For small system sizes, a direct solver such as SuperLU can be employed to obtain an accurate solution as long as the condition number is bounded by the reciprocal of the floating-point machine precision. However, SuperLU scales effectively only to hundreds of processors or less. For larger system sizes, it has been shown that physics-based (Chacon and Knoll 2003 J. Comput. Phys. 188 573–92) or other preconditioners can be applied to provide adequate solver performance. In recent years, we have been developing a new algebraic hybrid linear solver, PDSLin (Parallel Domain decomposition Schur complement-based Linear solver) (Yamazaki and Li 2010 Proc. VECPAR pp 421–34 and Yamazaki et al 2011 Technical Report). In this work, we compare numerical results from a direct solver and the proposed hybrid solver for the magnetic reconnection problem and demonstrate that the new hybrid solver is scalable to thousands of processors while maintaining the same robustness as a direct solver.