Dr. Catalyurek has been awarded a 4-year NSF PetaApps grant.
Tuesday 08/11/2009
Dr. Catalyurek together with collaborators from UCSD has been awarded a 4-year NSF PetaApps grant entitled "Enabling Breakthrough Kinetic Simulations of the Magnetosphere via Multi-zone Petascale Computing."
This project will develop an advanced 3-D hybrid simulation code (fluid electrons + kinetic ions) that include the coupling of the magnetosphere to the ionosphere. The hybrid magnetosphere model will be coupled with 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 transform our ability to model and predict how the solar wind couples to Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere.
Dr. Catalyurek will develop novel dynamic load balancing techniques for H3DM code.