Fall 2015
Seminars are held on Mondays from 2:30 - 3:30PM in Cullimore Hall, Room 611, unless noted otherwise. For questions about the seminar schedule, please contact David Shirokoff.
Date: October 19, 2015
Speaker: Antoine Cerfon
Courant Institute of Mathematical Science,
New York University
Title: "High Performance Elliptic Solvers for Magnetic Fusion"
Abstract:
An efficient strategy to study the dynamics of plasmas in magnetic fusion devices is through multi-scale simulations, which separate the calculation of the slowly evolving background magnetic configuration from the computation of the much faster turbulent dynamics and macroscopic instabilities. The background magnetic configuration is determined by a second order nonlinear elliptic equation called the Grad-Shafranov equation. Since the turbulence and stability properties of a plasma depend sensitively on the background magnetic field, Grad-Shafranov solvers need to be very accurate. They also need to be fast, so most of the computational time is spent on the very demanding turbulence simulations. In this talk, I will present a family of high order accurate Grad-Shafranov solvers, based on integral equation formulations and fast solvers, we recently developed to meet these requirements.