Turbulent Convection and Dynamos in Stars

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Turbulent Convection and Dynamos in Stars
The NASA HPCC ESS Cooperative Agreement PI
Andrea Malagoli Minnesota Contribution Paul
Woodward, David Porter, Wenlong Dai
We began this project with a 3-D code for
simulating turbulent convection in simplified
slab geometries. We tuned this code to achieve
the first performance milestone.
We then transformed our hydrodynamics code so
that it could exploit modern parallel machines to
simulate entire model stars. Using 5123 grids,
we simulated the development of differential
rotation in a convective envelope (at left) and
later the development of global convection
patterns in the deep envelope of a pulsating red
giant (top middle right).
Most recently, we are using our new MHD PPM code,
which has achieved the second and third
performance mile-stones, to simulate chunks of
turbulent convection, and MHD turbulence itself,
in simple geometries. In the future, we plan to
combine the best of both codes.