Exploring computational plasma physics and exascale fluid dynamics codes

Brian O'Shea, Michigan State University

Usage Details

The first project uses the Cello AMR code—a new, highly scalable adaptive mesh code based on the Charm++ library—to model multiphysics fluid problems in astrophysics. These problems have highly variable workloads per fluid element, and thus pose challenges to scaling to large supercomputers and problems. The intern will port physics modules from pre-existing codes, experiment with parallelism and load-balancing algorithms, and profile the code's performance on MSU's supercomputer and Blue Waters.

In the second project, a student will implement algorithms for cosmic ray diffusion and cosmic ray pressure into a pre-existing parallel magnetohydrodynamics code, the Enzo AMR code. This code will be used to study galaxy formation and evolution using cosmological simulations on the Blue Waters supercomputer. The scientific objective is to study the impact of cosmic ray pressure on the interstellar medium and star formation.