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

Abstract

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.