AMReX: a framework for block-structured adaptive mesh refinement

Journal Article · Sun May 12 00:00:00 EDT 2019 · Journal of Open Source Software

DOI:https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01370· OSTI ID:1526603

Zhang, Weiqun  ^[1]; Almgren, Ann  ^[1]; Beckner, Vince ^[1]; Bell, John  ^[1]; Blaschke, Johannes  ^[1]; Chan, Cy  ^[2]; Day, Marcus  ^[1]; Friesen, Brian  ^[3]; Gott, Kevin  ^[3]; Graves, Daniel  ^[2]; Katz, Max  ^[4]; Myers, Andrew  ^[1]; Nguyen, Tan  ^[2]; Nonaka, Andrew  ^[1]; Rosso, Michele  ^[1]; Williams, Samuel  ^[2]; Zingale, Michael  ^[5]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CCSE)
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Computational Research Div.
3. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
4. NVIDIA Corp., Santa Clara, CA (United States)
5. Stony Brook Univ., NY (United States). Dept. of Physics and Astronomy

AMReX is a C++ software framework that supports the development of block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) algorithms for solving systems of partial differential equations (PDEs) with complex boundary conditions on current and emerging architectures. AMR reduces the computational cost and memory footprint compared to a uniform mesh while preserving the local descriptions of different physical processes in complex multiphysics algorithms. Current AMReX-based application codes span a number of areas, including atmospheric modeling, astrophysics, combustion, cosmology, fluctuating hydrodynamics, multiphase flows, and particle accelerators. In particular, the AMReX-Astro GitHub repository holds a number of astrophysical modeling tools based on AMReX. The origins of AMReX trace back to the BoxLib software framework. AMReX supports a number of different time-stepping strategies and spatial discretizations. Solution strategies supported by AMReX range from level-by-level approaches (with or without subcycling in time) with multilevel synchronization to full-hierarchy approaches, and any combination thereof. User-defined kernels that operate on patches of data can be written in C++ or Fortran; there is also a Fortran-interface functionality which wraps the core C++ data structures and operations in Fortran wrappers so that an application code based on AMReX can be written entirely in Fortran.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 1526603
• Journal Information: Journal of Open Source Software, Vol. 4, Issue 37; ISSN 2475-9066
• Publisher: Open Source Initiative - NumFOCUS
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING