The Gkeyll 2.0 Code: Documentation Home¶
“Magic Chicken Software Framework” – Artificial ‘Intelligence’ view on Gkeyll
“Don’t Panic” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Gkeyll v2.0 (pronounced as in the book “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) is a computational plasma physics code mostly written in C and LuaJIT. Gkeyll contains solvers for gyrokinetic equations, Vlasov-Maxwell equations, and multi-fluid equations.
The Gkeyll package contains two major parts: the gkyl simulation framework and the the postgkyl post-processing package. Here you will find documentation for the full Gkeyll package.
For license see License.

- Installing Gkeyll
- Quickstart
- gkyl Reference
- Postgkyl reference
- Publications and theses
- Presentations
- Developer notes
- On use of the Maxima CAS
- Modal basis functions
- The recovery Maxima code
- Strong-Stability preserving Runge-Kutta time-steppers
- Normalized units for the Vlasov-Maxwell system
- From normalized to physical units in Vlasov and multi-fluid simulations
- The eigensystem of the Maxwell equations with extension to perfectly hyperbolic Maxwell equations
- The eigensystem of the Euler equations
- The eigensystem of the ten-moment equations
- Handling two-fluid five-moment and ten-moment source terms
- Time step calculation in Gkeyll
Authors¶
Gkeyll is developed at multiple institutions, with the present leadership residing at Princeton University’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), a Department of Energy (DOE) national lab, managed by Princeton University. Other major partners are Virginia Tech, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), University of Maryland, Indiana University, and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR).
As of 2022, the active funding for the project comes from:
- National Science Foundation’s CSSI program
- DOE’s SciDAC program
- ARPA-E BETHE Theory and Simulation Grant to Virginia Tech and PPPL
- Other NSF individual-PI awards to Princeton University
- PPPL LDRD program
Past funding has come from the Airforce Office of Scientific Research and NASA.
The CEO and Algorithm Alchemist of the project is Ammar Hakim.
The lead physicists for the project are Greg Hammett, Amitava Bhattacharjee, and Bhuvana Srinivasan.
The major contributors (see also) to the code are: James (Jimmy) Juno, Noah Mandell, Manaure (Mana) Francisquez, Petr Cagas, Liang Wang, Tess Bernard, Jason TenBarge, and Kolter Bradshaw. For a full list of contributors see our Github pages.