Time parallelization of plasma simulations using the parareal algorithm

Abstract

Simulation of fusion plasmas involve a broad range of timescales. In magnetically confined plasmas, such as in ITER, the timescale associated with the microturbulence responsible for transport and confinement timescales vary by an order of 10^6 10^9. Simulating this entire range of timescales is currently impossible, even on the most powerful supercomputers available. Space parallelization has so far been the most common approach to solve partial differential equations. Space parallelization alone has led to computational saturation for fluid codes, which means that the walltime for computaion does not linearly decrease with the increasing number of processors used. The application of the parareal algorithm to simulations of fusion plasmas ushers in a new avenue of parallelization, namely temporal parallelization. The algorithm has been successfully applied to plasma turbulence simulations, prior to which it has been applied to other relatively simpler problems. This work explores the extension of the applicability of the parareal algorithm to ITER relevant problems, starting with a diffusion-convection model.