37,617 research outputs found
Toward a GPU-Accelerated Immersed Boundary Method for Wind Forecasting Over Complex Terrain
A short-term wind power forecasting capability can be a valuable tool in the renewable energy industry to address load-balancing issues that arise from intermittent wind fields. Although numerical weather prediction models have been used to forecast winds, their applicability to micro-scale atmospheric boundary layer flows and ability to predict wind speeds at turbine hub height with a desired accuracy is not clear. To address this issue, we develop a multi-GPU parallel flow solver to forecast winds over complex terrain at the micro-scale, where computational domain size can range from meters to several kilometers. In the solver, we adopt the immersed boundary method and the Lagrangian dynamic large-eddy simulation model and extend them to atmospheric flows. The computations are accelerated on GPU clusters with a dual-level parallel implementation that interleaves MPI with CUDA. We evaluate the flow solver components against test problems and obtain preliminary results of flow over Bolund Hill, a coastal hill in Denmark
Hydrogen and helium line formation in OB dwarfs and giants. A hybrid non-LTE approach
Aims: Hydrogen and helium line spectra are crucial diagnostic features for
the quantitative analysis of OB stars. We compute synthetic spectra based on a
hybrid non-LTE approach in order to test the ability of these models to
reproduce high-resolution and high-S/N spectra of dwarf and giant stars and
also to compare them with published grids of non-LTE (OSTAR2002) and LTE
(Padova) models. Methods: Our approach solves the restricted non-LTE problem
based on classical line-blanketed LTE model atmospheres. State-of-the-art model
atoms and line-broadening theories are employed to model the H and He I/II
spectra over the entire optical range and in the near-IR. Results: The
synthetic spectra match almost all measurable hydrogen and helium lines
observed in six test stars over a wide spectral range from the Balmer limit to
the NIR, except for only a few well-understood cases. Our approach reproduces
other published non-LTE calculations, however avoids inconsistencies with the
modelling of the He I singlets recently discussed in the literature. It
improves on the published LTE models in many aspects: non-LTE strengthening and
the use of improved line-broadening data result in overall significant
differences in the line profiles and equivalent widths of the Balmer and helium
lines. Where possible, systematic effects on the stellar parameter
determination are quantified, e.g. gravities derived from the Hgamma wings may
be overestimated by up to ~0.2 dex at our upper temperature boundary in LTE.
(abridged)Comment: 25 pages, 19 figures. Modified according to suggestions of the
referee. Accepted for publication in A&A. Several figures in low resolution.
A high-resolution pdf version of the preprint can be downloaded from
http://www.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/~ai97/preprints/HHe_nieva.pd
Air pollution modelling using a graphics processing unit with CUDA
The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a powerful tool for parallel computing.
In the past years the performance and capabilities of GPUs have increased, and
the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) - a parallel computing
architecture - has been developed by NVIDIA to utilize this performance in
general purpose computations. Here we show for the first time a possible
application of GPU for environmental studies serving as a basement for decision
making strategies. A stochastic Lagrangian particle model has been developed on
CUDA to estimate the transport and the transformation of the radionuclides from
a single point source during an accidental release. Our results show that
parallel implementation achieves typical acceleration values in the order of
80-120 times compared to CPU using a single-threaded implementation on a 2.33
GHz desktop computer. Only very small differences have been found between the
results obtained from GPU and CPU simulations, which are comparable with the
effect of stochastic transport phenomena in atmosphere. The relatively high
speedup with no additional costs to maintain this parallel architecture could
result in a wide usage of GPU for diversified environmental applications in the
near future.Comment: 5 figure
Modelling element distributions in the atmospheres of magnetic Ap stars
In recent papers convincing evidence has been presented for chemical
stratification in Ap star atmospheres, and surface abundance maps have been
shown to correlate with the magnetic field direction. Radiatively driven
diffusion in magnetic fields is among the processes responsible for these
inhomogeneities. Here we explore the hypothesis that equilibrium
stratifications can, in a number of cases, explain the observed abundance maps
and vertical distributions of the various elements. The investigation of
equilibrium stratifications in stellar atmospheres with temperatures from 8500K
to 12000K and fields up to 10 kG reveals considerable variations in the
vertical distribution of the 5 elements studied (Mg, Si, Ca, Ti, Fe), often
with zones of large over- or under-abundances and with indications of other
competing processes (such as mass loss). Horizontal magnetic fields can be very
efficient in helping the accumulation of elements in higher layers. A
comparison between our calculations and the vertical abundance profiles and
surface maps derived by magnetic Doppler imaging reveals that equilibrium
stratifications are in a number of cases consistent with the main trends
inferred from observed spectra. However, it is not clear whether such
equilibrium solutions will ever be reached during the evolution of an Ap star.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, the paper will be published in Astronomy &
Astrophysics, on November 200
Parallel processing and non-uniform grids in global air quality modeling
A large-scale global air quality model, running efficiently on a single vector processor, is enhanced to make more realistic and more long-term simulations feasible. Two strategies are combined: non-uniform grids and parallel processing. The communication through the hierarchy of non-uniform grids interferes with the inter-processor communication. We discuss load balance in the decomposition of the domain, I/O, and inter-processor communication. A model shows that the communication overhead for both techniques is very low, whence non-uniform grids allow for large speed-ups and high speed-up can be expected from parallelization. The implementation is in progress, and results of experiments will be reported elsewhere
Effect of NLTE model atmospheres on photometric amplitudes and phases of early B-type pulsating stars
We study all possible sources of inaccuracy in theoretical values of the
photometric observables, i.e. amplitude ratios and phase differences, of early
B-type main sequence pulsators. Here, we discuss effects of parameters coming
from both models of stellar atmospheres and linear nonadiabatic theory of
stellar pulsation. In particular, we evaluate for the first time the effect of
the departure from the LTE approximation. The atmospheric input comes from
line-blanketed, LTE and NLTE plane-parallel, hydrostatic models. To compute the
limb-darkening coefficients for NLTE models, we use the Least-Square Method
taking into account the accuracy of the flux conservation. We present effects
of NLTE atmospheres, chemical composition and opacities on theoretical values
of the photometric observables of early B-type pulsators. To this end, we
compute tables with the passband fluxes, flux derivatives over effective
temperature and gravity as well as the non-linear limb-darkening coefficients
in 12 most often used passbands, i.e. in the Str\"omgern system, , and in
the Johnson-Cousins-Glass system, . We make these tables public
available at the Wroc{\l}aw HELAS Web page, http://helas.astro.uni.wroc.pl.Comment: 13 pages, 2 tables, 17 figues submitted to A&
Path-tracing Monte Carlo Library for 3D Radiative Transfer in Highly Resolved Cloudy Atmospheres
Interactions between clouds and radiation are at the root of many
difficulties in numerically predicting future weather and climate and in
retrieving the state of the atmosphere from remote sensing observations. The
large range of issues related to these interactions, and in particular to
three-dimensional interactions, motivated the development of accurate radiative
tools able to compute all types of radiative metrics, from monochromatic, local
and directional observables, to integrated energetic quantities. In the
continuity of this community effort, we propose here an open-source library for
general use in Monte Carlo algorithms. This library is devoted to the
acceleration of path-tracing in complex data, typically high-resolution
large-domain grounds and clouds. The main algorithmic advances embedded in the
library are those related to the construction and traversal of hierarchical
grids accelerating the tracing of paths through heterogeneous fields in
null-collision (maximum cross-section) algorithms. We show that with these
hierarchical grids, the computing time is only weakly sensitivive to the
refinement of the volumetric data. The library is tested with a rendering
algorithm that produces synthetic images of cloud radiances. Two other examples
are given as illustrations, that are respectively used to analyse the
transmission of solar radiation under a cloud together with its sensitivity to
an optical parameter, and to assess a parametrization of 3D radiative effects
of clouds.Comment: Submitted to JAMES, revised and submitted again (this is v2
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