Parallelization of a Magnetohydrodynamics Model for Plasma Simulation

Plasma simulations are inherently complex due to the numerous and intricate processes that naturally occur to matter in this state. Computer simulations and visualizations of plasma help researchers and scientists understand the physics that takes place in it. We have developed a parallel implementation of an application used to simulate and visualize the process of convection in plasma cells. This application implements a magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) approach to plasma modeling by numerically solving a fourth-order two-dimensional differential scheme. Results of experimentation with our parallel implementation are presented and analyzed. We managed to speedup the program by a factor of nearly $42\times$ after parallelizing the code with OpenMP and using 128 cores on our Intel Xeon Phi KNL server. We also achieved an almost linear scalability of the execution time when increasing the size of the spatial and temporal domains.