Multi-GPU simulations of Vlasov's equation using Vlasiator

We present a numerical method, based on a three-dimensional finite volume wave-propagation algorithm, for solving the Vlasov equation in a full six-dimensional (three spatial coordinates, three velocity coordinates) case in length scales comparable to the size of the Earth’s magnetosphere. The method uses Strang splitting to separate propagation in spatial and velocity coordinates, and is second-order accurate in spatial and velocity spaces and in time. The method has been implemented on general-purpose graphics processing units for faster computations and has been parallelised using the message passing interface. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.