Workshop "Computational Solar and Astrophysical Modeling"

Workshop, 14-18 September, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany

This summer school will acquaint a generation of young researchers (advanced master students, PhDs, and junior postdoctoral researchers) to modern open-source software efforts adapted to High Performance Computing platforms, with a deliberate focus on hands-on sessions. In these sessions, participants will work with three different open-source software packages, learn about their typical applications and evaluate their performance aspects on massively parallel systems.

This school is organized by the BELSPO funded IAP network P7/08 CHARM

Participants will make use of the MPI-AMRVAC framework (a Fortran 90, MPI-parallelized, grid-adaptive PDE solver, Porth et al., 2014, ApJS, 214, 4) on applications covering plasma dynamics in the solar atmosphere and into the heliosphere. For fully kinetic plasma modeling of e.g. the Earth's magnetosphere, they will work with iPic3D (a C++, MPI-parallelized, implicit moment Particle-In-Cell solver, Markidis et al., Mathematics and Computers in Simulations, 2010, 80, 1509). Participants will also be introduced to the open source Swift cosmological particle hydrodynamics code (http://swiftsim.sourceforge.net/). Swift has hydrodynamics implementations of both SPH and the weighted particle hydrodynamics scheme Gizmo, and a gravity implementation based on both fast-multipoles and a tree-code. It uses task-based parallelism to exploit hybrid multi-threathed/MPI parallelism and has some kernels optimised for accelerators.

Dedicated compute time on the FZ Julich supercomputers will be available, allowing participants to explore scaling aspects, perform data analysis and visualization (using Paraview and Visit), while working on representative state-of-the-art scientific simulations. The school is open to a maximum of 28 participants, and is supported by a Belgian Belspo-funded Interuniversity Attraction Pole P7/08 CHARM (http://wis.kuleuven.be/CHARM) connecting heliospheric to astrophysical communities. Participation is open to everyone, but applications will be reviewed until maximal capacity is reached. The school links up expertise from several Belgian universities (KU Leuven, ULB, Gent University) and federal research institutes (Royal Observatory and Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy), along with the Institute for Computational Cosmology (Durham University, UK), FZ Julich, and Leiden University.