From stars to storms

released 11.08.07

The inside of a star at the end of its life may seem more than a galaxy away from a thunderstorm cell on Earth, but not to the University of Minnesota's Paul Woodward and NCSA's Chief Science Officer Bob Wilhelmson. The star interiors that Woodward studies at his Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering and through runs on NCSA machines are analogous to an atmosphere, so he and Wilhelmson are working to adapt Woodward's code to simulate severe thunderstorms, a research area of interest to Wilhelmson.

Woodward used a 2007 NCSA summer fellowship to work with an NCSA team and although they came close, Woodward says he still has some code debugging to do. "The rain doesn't fall properly yet, but the code runs awfully fast and the cumulus cloud I made on my machines here in Minnesota looked pretty good," Woodward writes in an email message. Their plan is to test the applicability of the new code's structure, parallel implementation, and unusual multifluid advection algorithm for severe storm research.

Their hope is that this experimental code might run fast enough on NCSA's machine Abe to make fully interactive storm simulation practical across a substantial portion of the machine at a reasonable level of simulation accuracy. They are also exploring scaling the code for a petascale application.

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