  The JOREK extended magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) code is a widely used
simulation code for studying the non-linear dynamics of large-scale
instabilities in divertor tokamak plasmas. Due to the large scale-separation
intrinsic to these phenomena both in space and time, the computational costs
for simulations in realistic geometry and with realistic parameters can be very
high, motivating the investment of considerable effort for optimization. In
this article, a set of developments regarding the JOREK solver and
preconditioner is described, which lead to overall significant benefits for
large production simulations. This comprises in particular enhanced convergence
in highly non-linear scenarios and a general reduction of memory consumption
and computational costs. The developments include faster construction of
preconditioner matrices, a domain decomposition of preconditioning matrices for
solver libraries that can handle distributed matrices, interfaces for
additional solver libraries, an option to use matrix compression methods, and
the implementation of a complex solver interface for the preconditioner. The
most significant development presented consists in a generalization of the
physics based preconditioner to "mode groups", which allows to account for the
dominant interactions between toroidal Fourier modes in highly non-linear
simulations. At the cost of a moderate increase of memory consumption, the
technique can strongly enhance convergence in suitable cases allowing to use
significantly larger time steps. For all developments, benchmarks based on
typical simulation cases demonstrate the resulting improvements.
