Driving solar coronal MHD simulations on high-performance computers

TL;DR

This paper enhances high-performance computing techniques for solar coronal MHD simulations, enabling more realistic and scalable models of the Sun's active regions by optimizing boundary conditions and data input/output strategies.

Contribution

It introduces novel boundary conditions and I/O strategies that significantly improve the scalability and realism of solar coronal MHD simulations on HPC systems.

Findings

Scalability improved by over an order of magnitude

New boundary condition for non-vertical magnetic fields

More realistic 3D MHD simulations of the solar corona

Abstract

The quality of today's research is often tightly limited to the available computing power and scalability of codes to many processors. For example, tackling the problem of heating the solar corona requires a most realistic description of the plasma dynamics and the magnetic field. Numerically solving such a magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) description of a small active region (AR) on the Sun requires millions of computation hours on current high-performance computing (HPC) hardware. The aim of this work is to describe methods for an efficient parallelization of boundary conditions and data input/output (IO) strategies that allow for a better scaling towards thousands of processors (CPUs). The Pencil Code is tested before and after optimization to compare the performance and scalability of a coronal MHD model above an AR. We present a novel boundary condition for non-vertical magnetic fields in the photosphere, where we approach the realistic pressure increase below the photosphere. With that, magnetic flux bundles become narrower with depth and the flux density increases accordingly. The scalability is improved by more than one order of magnitude through the HPC-friendly boundary conditions and IO strategies. This work describes also the necessary nudging methods to drive the MHD model with observed magnetic fields from the Sun's photosphere. In addition, we present the upper and lower atmospheric boundary conditions (photospheric and towards the outer corona), including swamp layers to diminish perturbations before they reach the boundaries. Altogether, these methods enable more realistic 3D MHD simulations than previous models regarding the coronal heating problem above an AR -- simply because of the ability to use a large amount of CPUs efficiently in parallel.