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| Paper: |
GPU Computing in Space Weather Modeling |
| Volume: |
474, Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows (ASTRONUM2012) |
| Page: |
131 |
| Authors: |
Feng, X.; Zhong, D.; Xiang, C.; Zhang, Y. |
| Abstract: |
Space weather refers to conditions on the Sun and in the solar wind, magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere that can
influence the performance and reliability of space-borne and ground-based technological systems and that affect human life or
health. In order to make the real- or faster than real-time numerical prediction of adverse space weather events and their
influence on the geospace environment, high-performance computational models are required. The main objective in this
article is to explore the application of programmable graphic processing units (GPUs) to the numerical space weather
modeling for the study of solar wind background that is a crucial part in the numerical space weather modeling. GPU
programming is realized for our Solar-Interplanetary-CESE MHD model (SIP-CESE MHD model) by numerically studying the
solar corona/interplanetary solar wind. The global solar wind structures is obtained by the established GPU model with
the magnetic field synoptic data as input. The simulated global structures for Carrington rotation 2060 agrees well
with solar observations and solar wind measurements from spacecraft near the Earth.
The model's implementation of the adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) and message passing interface (MPI) enables the full
exploitation of the computing power in a heterogeneous CPU/GPU cluster and significantly improves the overall performance.
Our initial tests with available hardware show speedups of roughly 5x compared to traditional software implementation.
This work presents a novel application of GPU to the space weather study. |
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