News
ChEESE flagship code XSHELLS simulates geomagnetic reversals with unprecedented realism
25 May 2020

A component of ChEESE´s pilot demonstrator on Geomagnetic Forecasts (PD11) comprises the simulation and analysis of geomagnetic reversals, which are exceptional periods in the Earth’s history when the magnetic North becomes South, and vice-versa. This is a process which occurred over the history of the Earth. Over the past 10 million years, there were about four to five such reversals per million years.  The last reversal took place about 780,000 years ago, which indicates that the next one may be overdue. Since the paleomagnetic record of such events is sparse in both space and time, ChEESE will resort to numerical simulations to complement our description of reversals. 

In order to better understand the nature of geomagnetic fields during a reversal, ChEESE is developing a workflow to analyse reversals simulated using the flagship code XSHELLS. These simulations have been running with an unprecedented level of turbulence due to the combined effects of careful survey of parameter space and improved code performance.

One of the questions that ChEESE wants to answer is how low geomagnetic intensity gets during a reversal. This is a question of practical interest, since magnetic fields shield us from solar wind, thereby limiting hazards for artificial satellites revolving around the Earth as well as spacecraft flying through the area. 

To give you an idea, the figure below shows the intensity of the field in 2020, based on the recently released 13th generation of the international geomagnetic reference field (IGRF). 

 

Geomagnetic Reference Field

 

The intensity is stronger at high latitudes (this reflects the mostly dipolar character of the field generated by Earth in its liquid core via dynamo action); it can reach values as large as 75 microTesla (μT). There is a region of low intensity which is known as the south Atlantic anomaly, which is known to have a high level of satellite hazards. There the intensity is quite low (about 20 μT).

The video below shows how the intensity evolves during a reversal that ChEESE has simulated. The simulation was done using the flagship code XSHELLS run at a resolution of (336 x 213 x 170), which is, by far, the highest resolution reported to date for the simulation of a geomagnetic reversal. The integration with XSHELLS spans the equivalent of 3.5 million geophysical years (using national allocations). The full 3D analysis of the simulation has yet to be completed, but here is a teaser on how the intensity fluctuates during a simulated reversal. 

 

 

In this video, the intensity is shown to the left. The right panel shows the vertical component of the magnetic field. Red means that the associated magnetic field lines are going inside the earth, and blue means that they are going outside the earth. The structure of the map of the vertical component reflects the fact that the field is mostly dipolar. The structure of the field becomes particular when the field flips - there is a section in the video where you will notice that both the intensity is weak (to the point that its maximum at that point in time in the simulation is lower than the present-day minimum) and the structure of the field is simultaneously multipolar - meaning that there are several North and South poles. It is precisely this transitional period which will be critical for us, if a reversal were to occur.

This video spans a time interval of about 20,000 years from its start to its end. The transitional period lasts for a few hundred years. 

News
ChEESE wins Best Paper Award at GEOProcessing 2020
11 May 2020
ChEESE publication

 

The ChEESE paper "A Microservices Approach for Parallel Applications Design: A Case Study for CFD Simulation in Geoscience Domain" has won the Best Paper Award at the Twelfth International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services (GEOProcessing 2020) to be held in Valencia, Spain on 21- 25 November 2020.

Authored by High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart researcher Alexey Cheptsov and his cooperation partner from industry Oleg Beljaev, the paper talks about creating an approach for encapsulation of workflow-based applications into services, which are flexible enough to run on heterogeneous, distributed infrastructures spanning over both industrial sensor services and parallel computing systems. The approach is demonstrated on a computational fluid dynamics simulation study of aerodynamic processes in complex underground mine ventilation networks.

The research explained in this paper has led to the creation of a workflow management system prototype for geoscience applications that may be accessed at https://fs.hlrs.de/projects/cheese/wms-light_v01.tgz.

News
ChEESE awarded almost 110M core hours for earthquake, volcano and tsunami research
11 May 2020

ChEESE has been awarded almost 110 million core hours to be used towards HPC-related research in earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis after winning 3 Project Access proposals in the 20th PRACE call. The allocated core hours will specifically be used to support several of ChEESE´s Exascale pilot demonstrators on seismic tomography, volcanic ash hazard and forecast and tsunami early warning. The PRACE awards, which are valid from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021, will allow ChEESE partners to access CINECA´s brand-new Marconi-100 and GENCI´s Joliot Curie supercomputers.

On the other hand, PRACE also reserves around 0.5% of the total resources available for their project access calls for Centres of Excellence (CoE). This additional pool will allow ChEESE to access CINECA´s Marconi (500.000 hours), Swiss National Supercomputing Center´s Piz Daint (340.000 hours), GENCI´s Joliot Curie KNL (300.000 hours), High Performance Computing Center, Stuttgart´s Hawk (250.000 hours), Barcelona Supercomputing Center´s MareNostrum (200.000 hours) and GENCI´s Joliot Curie SKL (100.000 hours).

Learn more about PRACE call for proposals for project access: https://prace-ri.eu/hpc-access/calls-for-proposals/