The nonlinear gyro-kinetic flux tube code GKW Original Research Article

A new nonlinear gyro-kinetic flux tube code (GKW) for the simulation of micro instabilities and turbulence in magnetic confinement plasmas is presented in this paper. The code incorporates all physics effects that can be expected from a state of the art gyro-kinetic simulation code in the local limit: kinetic electrons, electromagnetic effects, collisions, full general geometry with a coupling to a MHD equilibrium code, and image shearing. In addition the physics of plasma rotation has been implemented through a formulation of the gyro-kinetic equation in the co-moving system. The gyro-kinetic model is five-dimensional and requires a massive parallel approach. GKW has been parallelised using MPI and scales well up to 8192+ cores. The paper presents the set of equations solved, the numerical methods, the code structure, and the essential benchmarks.