ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid: PetaFLOPS Geospace Simulations

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Note: The project described in this document is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) to use TeraGrid's petascale environments for highly advanced scientific analysis and simulations that advance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research. For more, see ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid.

This project will develop a petaFLOPS-capable version of the OpenGGCM (Open Geospace General Circulation Model), which is a coupled community model of the Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere.

The computationally challenging part of the OpenGGCM is the MHD magnetosphere core code, which, in the current code, is under-resolved and lacks some of the necessary physics to model some of the key aspects of the magnetosphere - solar wind interaction. The petaFLOPS OpenGGCM will overcome these limitations by including optimized code for new hardware, such as the IBM Cell Broadband Engine (CBE). The project will also develop a code library that intelligently reduces and compresses the data output from the simulation. The compression technique will use wavelet compression to reduce output data before they are written to storage.

This project will perform the first true multiscale simulations that encompass all scales, from the global scale of the magnetosphere down to the smallest scales at which the fluid approximation breaks down. The increased model resolution will dramatically reduce numerical effects, and will make it possible to study dissipation sensitive phenomena, such as turbulence and its effects. The development of I/O reduction algorithms introduces a new approach to mitigate the I/O bottlenecks inherent to petascale systems.

The petascale-enabled P-OpenGGCM will be made available at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) for runs on demand, and the libraries developed to exploit the CBE architecture and to perform I/O compression will be made publicly available.

For more, see award abstract #0749125 on the National Science Foundation (NSF) web site.