Adaptive Mesh Computations with the PLUTO Code for Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics

We present an overview of the current version of the PLUTO code for numerical simulations of astrophysical fluid flows over block-structured adaptive grids. The code preserves its modular framework for the solution of the classical or relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations while exploiting the distributed infrastructure of the Chombo library for multidimensional adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) parallel computations. Equations are evolved in time using an explicit second-order, dimensionally unsplit time stepping scheme based on a cell-centered discretization of the flow variables. Efficiency and robustness are shown through multidimensional benchmarks and applications to problems of astrophysical relevance.