3D Kinetic Simulations of Whistler Turbulence on a Parallel Supercomputer

首席研究员团队将在南加州大学(USC)和洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室(LANL)的联合努力下，对哨子湍流进行3D电磁粒子单元模拟，以了解哨子湍流的演变及其在太阳风和天体物理等离子体中的能量传输和分布中的作用。该团队将研究地球和日光层如何对湍流产生的小规模微观等离子体过程做出反应，这可能会显著影响相互关联的太阳-日光层-地球系统中宏观尺度的能量和动量传输。该团队还将把高性能计算技术应用到等离子体物理研究中，通过使用TB的内存在最先进的大规模并行超级计算机体系结构上模拟数百亿到数千亿粒子的集体行为。这项研究将有助于更好地理解微尺度等离子体过程对控制地球空间环境的宏观尺度等离子体系统的全球动态的影响。这项研究将提供与即将执行的航天器飞行任务的数据分析和飞行任务规划有关的建模工具和物理参数。这些成果还将直接有助于改进空间天气预报，并将支持和维持学术机构和政府研究实验室之间的协作研究基础设施。该项目将支持一名研究生的博士论文，并将通过将本研究中开发的研究结果和计算模型纳入南加州大学研究生水平的等离子体物理和计算模拟课程，为额外的教育和培训做出贡献。

The Principal Investigator's team will perform 3D electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations of whistler turbulence in a joint effort by the University of Southern California (USC) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in order to understand the evolution of whistler turbulence and its role in energy transport and distribution in the solar wind and astrophysical plasmas. This team will study how the Earth and the heliosphere respond to small-scale, microscopic plasma processes created by turbulence, which may significantly affect the energy and momentum transport at the macroscopic scale in the interconnected Sun-heliosphere-Earth system. This team will also apply high performance computing techniques to plasma physics research through simulating the collective behavior of tens to hundreds of billions of particles on state-of-the-art, massively parallel supercomputers architectures using terabytes of memory. This research will lead to improved understanding of the effects of micro-scale plasma processes on the global dynamics of the macro-scale plasma systems that control the geospace environment. This research will provide modeling tools and physics parameters that will be relevant to the data analysis and mission planning to be performed for upcoming spacecraft missions. These results will also directly contribute to improving space weather predictions and will support and sustain a collaborative research infrastructure between an academic institution and a government research laboratory. This project will support a graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation, and will contribute to additional education and training through the incorporation of the research results and computational models developed in this study into graduate-level plasma physics and computational simulation courses at USC.