Collaborative Research: Enabling Breakthrough Kinetic Simulations of the Magnetosphere via Multi-zone Petascale Computing

该奖项由2009年《美国复苏和再投资法》(公法111-5)资助。该项目将开发一种先进的3-D混合模拟程序(流体电子+动能离子)，其中包括磁层与电离层的耦合。混合磁层模型将与海军研究实验室开发的电离层模型相耦合。现有的代码(H3D)将通过多区域异步时间推进和粒子分割等先进技术来增强以用于千万亿级应用。通过将模型结果与美国宇航局各种任务的观测数据进行比较，将得到名为H3 DM(多区域的“M”)的代码将得到验证。成功地开发出具有真实耦合到电离层的3-D全球混合磁层模拟，有可能改变我们建模和预测太阳风如何耦合到地球磁层和电离层的能力。该项目具有社会效益，因为它与空间天气和空间技术相关。该项目具有教育效益，研究中既包括本科生也包括研究生。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This project will develop an advanced 3-D hybrid simulation code (fluid electrons + kinetic ions) that included the coupling of the magnetosphere to the ionosphere. The hybrid magnetosphere model will be coupled an ionospheric model developed at the Naval Research Laboratory. The existing code (H3D) will be enhanced for petascale application with advanced techniques such as multi-zone asynchronous time-stepping and particle splitting. The resulting code, called H3DM ("M" for multi-zone) will be validated by comparing model results with observational data from a variety of NASA missions.The successful development of a 3-D global, hybrid simulation of the magnetosphere with realistic coupling to the ionosphere has the potential to be transformative in our abilities to model and predict how the solar wind couples to Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere.The project has societal benefits because of its relevance to space weather and space technology. The project has educational benefits and includes both undergraduates an graduate students in the research.