NASA Scales Space Weather Simulation to 25,000 Processors

As detailed in the article, "Cracking the Mysteries of Space Weather," by Jarrett Cohen of NASA, Earth is mostly protected from solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and other space weather events by the magnetosphere, a magnetic field cocoon that surrounds it. But sometimes Earth's magnetosphere 'cracks' and lets space weather inside, where it can cause damage. Getting space weather details right means capturing everything from the 1.28 million kilometer-sized magnetosphere down to subatomic-scale electrons. Doing that in one simulation would require supercomputers more than 1,000 times faster than those available today, so the research team breaks the problem into two parts. They start with 'local' simulations that include full electron physics of regions in the magnetosphere where reconnection is known to occur, followed by 'global' simulations.Accessing up to 25,000 processor cores on Pleiades, Dr. Karimabadi said that his group can run 'kinetic' simulations that treat each electron with its full properties and understand how electrons allow reconnection to occur.