Stefan R. Schnake | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Sweep-based, implicit solutions of the multidimensional BGK equation on unstructured grids

We present a nodal discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) kinetic equation on multi-dimensional, unstructured grids. The method uses implicit, sweep-based solvers and a moment-preserving projection of the Maxwellian source to enable high-order accuracy in time while avoiding restrictive time steps imposed by boundary layers and other geometry-induced features. We verify that the method is correct in the continuum limit by comparing to closed-form and high-order solutions of the Sod shock problem on 2 and 3D unstructured grids. Linear L2 stability is demonstrated for a B-stable diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta method of third order. The solver uses a hybrid parallel scheme based on spatial domain decomposition with local sweeps performed on CPU and GPU hardware. Platform-portability is demonstrated through the development of new GPU-friendly, graph-based sweep algorithms that are implemented using the Kokkos performance portability library and achieve greater than 20 times speedup on NVIDIA H100 GPUs compared to 64-core AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs. Finally, we show results on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for a boundary value problem with 2.77 trillion phase space degrees of freedom that executed on 1536 nodes utilizing 6144 AMD MI250X GPUs.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2023

A semi-implicit dynamical low-rank discontinuous Galerkin method for space homogeneous kinetic equations. Part I: emission and absorption

Dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA) is an emerging tool for reducing computational costs and provides memory savings when solving high-dimensional problems. In this work, we propose and analyze a semi-implicit dynamical low-rank discontinuous Galerkin (DLR-DG) method for the space homogeneous kinetic equation with a relaxation operator, modeling the emission and absorption of particles by a background medium. Both DLRA and the DG scheme can be formulated as Galerkin equations. To ensure their consistency, a weighted DLRA is introduced so that the resulting DLR-DG solution is a solution to the fully discrete DG scheme in a subspace of the classical DG solution space. Similar to the classical DG method, we show that the proposed DLR-DG method is well-posed. We also identify conditions such that the DLR-DG solution converges to the equilibrium. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the theoretical findings.

math.NA↗