Unlocking the Mysteries of Space

By Tiffany Trader

June 16, 2015

Some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are helping NASA scientists reveal the mysteries of the universe. The intensive discovery process would not be possible without the modeling and simulation capabilities of high-performance computers, like Pleiades, which is located at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center, and Titan, the fastest US system, operated by the Department of Energy. Here are two projects that showcase the essential role of HPC in understanding space phenomena, along with remarkable renderings.

#1 — Deconstructing “Hot Jupiters”

Vriesema_J_Field_Lines_large

The first depicts a night-side view of magnetic field lines in a simulation of a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet. The moniker is applied to planets that are of similar size to Jupiter but are much closer to their host stars. Astrophysicist Tamara Rogers and her team at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Simulations conducted these simulations to better understand the planets’ inner workings and how they formed. The simulations — run on the Pleiades supercomputer — were the first to include magnetic fields. Simulations projects like these are crucial for making sense of the observational data extracted from space-based instruments.

“By studying hot Jupiters, so different from the gas giants that slowly circle our own Sun, astronomers are expanding their knowledge of planetary structure and evolution—research that is crucial to the search for rocky, Earth-like exoplanets that may support life,” writes Michelle Moyer with NASA Ames Research Center.

More information is available here.

#2 — Magnetic Reconnection Pushes Limits of Supercomputing

magnetic_flex_ropes_OLCF

The second impressive rendering illustrates the formation of “magnetic flux ropes” within the reconnection layer of the earth’s magnetosphere. In support of the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, a multi-institution research team led by William Daughton of Los Alamos National Laboratory, is using Titan to study magnetic reconnection, a phenomenon associated with space weather that occurs when charged particles interact strongly with magnetic fields.

Daughton and his colleagues have been simulating this process for five years, using the Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer and then its successor, the Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). NASA scientists compare the simulations with experimental data obtained from the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission.

Speaking to the importance of being able to run larger simulations, Daughton said that the 10X-50X improvement offered by the next-generation of supercomputers will expand the class of problems that scientists can solve. OLCF is on track to get this computational power boost when Summit comes online in 2018. Still Daughton notes that “for these really huge runs, people are going to have to move to some in situ analysis and visualization because they just won’t be able to save everything.”

See the OLCF feature piece by Eric Gedenk for more on this interesting research.

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