AstroGK News
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8/3/09: NASA Proposal Funded
Professor Howes' proposal to the NASA Solar and Heliospheric Physics Program , entitled "The Dynamics of the Dissipation Range in Solar Wind Turbulence," has been funded for the period 1/1/2010 to 12/31/2012. The proposed investigation aims to use linear Vlasov-Maxwell kinetic theory to construct a suite of observational measures aimed at distinguishing the characteristic wave modes underlying the turbulence in the dissipation range, and employs nonlinear AstroGK simulations as a means of testing these measures.
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6/30/09: Entropy Cascade PRL Published
A key paper by our collaboration on the numerical demonstration of the entropy cascade, entitled Nonlinear phase mixing and phase-space cascade of entropy in gyrokinetic plasma turbulence, has been published in Physical Review Letters. This paper presents an AstroGK numerical investigation of electrostatic turbulence in weakly collisional, magnetized plasma, which can be interpreted as a cascade of entropy in phase space, proposed as a universal mechanism for dissipation of energy in magnetized plasma turbulence.
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6/4/09: NSF TeraGrid Award of 6,000,000 cpu-hours
Professor Howes' proposal to the National Science Foundations TeraGrid project, entitled "Kinetic Dissipation of Astrophysical Plasma Turbulence," has been awarded 6,000,000 cpu-hours for the period 7/1/2009-6/30/2010 on Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee. Kraken is a Cray XT5 with 99,072 computing cores, boasting a peak performance of 1.03 petaflops which places it in the top five computers in the world. The goal of this project is to employ gyrokinetic theory, an elegant and efficient theoretical framework, in conjunction with today's most advanced supercomputing resources, to investigate using AstroGK simulations the dissipation of turbulence in astrophysical plasmas and the resulting plasma heating, a key problem of fundamental importance in space physics and astrophysics.
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3/30/09: MPSFP Proposal Funded
Professor Howes' proposal to the Math & Physical Sciences Funding Program, entitled "Calibrated Numerical Guidance for Basic Plasma Turbulence Experiments," has been funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Iowa. Funding will support research on AstroGK gyrokinetic simulations in support of basic plasma turbulence experiments on the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) at UCLA.
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2/7/08: PoP Accepted!
The recent submission to Physics of Plasmas, Inertial range turbulence in kinetic plasmas, has been accepted. It will appear in the May Special Issue from the APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting.
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1/17/08: INCITE Award of 4,000,000 cpu-hours
Along with my colleague Bill Dorland (U. Maryland), I have been awarded a 4,000,000 cpu-hour supercomputer allocation through the INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) competition from the Office of Science in the US Department of Energy. Our project, Fluctuation Spectra and Anomalous Heating in Magnetized Plasma Turbulence, will use Jaguar, a Cray XT3/4 system at the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Read the 2008 INCITE Award press release from the DOE.
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1/3/08: JGR Accepted!
Our recent submission to Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics, A Model of Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas: Implications for the Dissipation Range in the Solar Wind, has been accepted. Look for it soon!
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12/28/07: PRL Accepted!
Our recent submission to Physical Review Letters, Kinetic Simulations of Magnetized Turbulence in Astrophysical Plasmas, has been accepted. Look for it in the upocoming February 15, 2008 issue.
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9/19/07: AstroGK ported to Franklin
AstroGK has been successfully ported to Franklin, the new 19,320 processor Cray XT4 at NERSC.