Session

DescriptionThis minisymposium is dedicated to addressing computational challenges in magnetic fusion research and, more specifically, latest progress made in the development of kinetic codes for simulating the edge region of tokamak reactors. This outer plasma region involves particularly steep pressure gradients, large amplitude fluctuations, the presence of many types of impurities, high collisionality among the different plasma species as well as neutral atoms, and non-trivial plasma-wall boundary conditions. These conditions are thus particularly challenging to model and this topic is therefore recognized as a frontier domain. The presentations in this session will cover improvements made to today's most advanced gyrokinetic edge codes at three different levels: (1) Enhancements to the simulation models for including the particularly complex physical processes in this outer plasma region, (2) novel discretization schemes allowing for more compact representations and consequently more efficient computations, and (3) Improved parallelization schemes for efficiently exploiting today's massively parallel and GPU-accelerated platforms. The codes presented in this minisymposium provide excellent illustrations of the different numerical representations considered in the plasma community for carrying out kinetic simulations: Eulerian, moment-based, PIC and semi-Lagrangian. These approaches are obviously common to many other fields of science.