MRI: Acquisition of a Computer Cluster for the Study of Fluids, Heliophysics, and Astrophysical Plasmas

University Of New Hampshire, Durham NH

Investigators

Abstract

A homogeneous high-performance computing cluster for the simulation of fluids, heliophysics, and astrophysical plasmas will be built at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). The fluid and plasma simulations performed at UNH share very similar hardware requirements, making it possible to design an instrument with a high expected usage rate and broad scientific applications. The cluster will play a critical role in the formation of UNH graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to modern computational methods and parallel computing, as well as for the recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce. Numerical simulations of fluids and plasmas play a critical role in the study of a wide range of problems in astrophysics, heliophysics, and geophysics. Modeling nearly-collisionless plasmas is necessary to understand the generation of the solar wind, its propagation, its interaction with the Earth's magnetosphere, and its effects on, for example, the Earth's climate or artificial satellites. The same physics governs the evolution of accretion disks around many of the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, including the soon-to-be imaged black hole at the center of our own Milky Way. Magnetohydrodynamics simulations, on the other hand, help us understand the evolution of the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, as well as some of the highest-energy events observable in the Universe: the collisions of black holes and neutron stars that power gravitational wave signals. This grant will enable new understanding in all of these research areas through building a new computer cluster for numerical simulations of fluids and plasmas. The cluster will have 1760 compute nodes with Infiniband communication, and 283+ Tb of storage/archival space. This award was co-funded between the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences and the Division of Physics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.