This is a cross-disciplinary project to develop a new version of the OpenGGCM (Open geospace general circulation model) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code that will run efficiently on a variety of computing environments. The MHD code will include a generalized Ohm's law and the Hall term to enable it to accurately model magnetic reconnection as well as plasma instabilities in thin current sheets. The code will be used to investigate the impact of Hall physics and secondary instabilities on 3D reconnection and generation of Flux Transfer Events (FTEs) at the dayside, as well as on substorm onset at the night side. The project will also investigate the interplay between the ballooning instability near Earth and magnetic reconnection in the mid-tail. The project will develop and utilize an automatic computer code generation tool that allows the user to create source code appropriate to a specific computer architecture. In addition to examining the physics of the magnetosphere using this code, the project will also make the code generating tool into an open source toolkit that will have broad applicability to science applications that are based on what are known as stencil computations.
Magnetic reconnection and secondary instabilities of thin current sheets are of crucial importance to understanding the dynamics of Earth's global magnetosphere and space weather. Incorporating and understanding realistic physics into global magnetospheric codes is an important step in modeling and forecasting space weather. The computational methods that will be developed are applicable to a large range of applications in science and engineering that involve solving partial differential equations. The proposal also has an extensive educational component. It includes curriculum enhancement and creation of a summer seminar series to form a computational community at UNH, targeting graduate students, postdocs and faculty. A space weather demonstration device based on the PlayStation-3 with also be developed and used for outreach to students. This outreach program will develop different versions of the demonstration applicable to a wide range of students, from high school all the way through to graduate school.
