High Performance Computations for Short-Lived Plasmas

Abstract

Supercomputer simulations are of fundamental importance for understanding the physics of nonlinear processes in high temperature pulse plasma. The development of predictive codes is an urgent problem in computational plasma physics, as well as many other fields of science. Radiative magneto-hydrodynamics 3D code MARPLE is a full-scale multiphysics research code using the state-of-the-art physics, mathematics, and numerics as well as the up-to-date high performance computing functionality. Scalability study demonstrated that the code can fit existing petaFLOPS supercomputers as well as next-generation exaFLOPS ones. The code is currently used for multiphysics simulations, specifically for high energy density plasma in pulsed-power facilities. Compression of a wire array by a high-current discharge is a valuable tool for fundamental study of matter in extreme states. Different configurations of wire arrays were investigated numerically. A series of high resolution computations helped to create a very compact spherical bright radiation source using dedicated design of the electrodes, the wire array, and the mass distribution along the wires.