19,910 research outputs found
Modeling sea level changes and geodetic variations by glacial isostasy: the improved SELEN code
We describe the basic features of SELEN, an open source Fortran 90 program
for the numerical solution of the so-called "Sea Level Equation" for a
spherical, layered, non-rotating Earth with Maxwell viscoelastic rheology. The
Sea Level Equation was introduced in the 70s to model the sea level variations
in response to the melting of late-Pleistocene ice-sheets, but it can be also
employed for predictions of geodetic quantities such as vertical and horizontal
surface displacements and gravity variations on a global and a regional scale.
SELEN (acronym of SEa Level EquatioN solver) is particularly oriented to
scientists at their first approach to the glacial isostatic adjustment problem
and, according to our experience, it can be successfully used in teaching. The
current release (2.9) considerably improves the previous versions of the code
in terms of computational efficiency, portability and versatility. In this
paper we describe the essentials of the theory behind the Sea Level Equation,
the purposes of SELEN and its implementation, and we provide practical
guidelines for the use of the program. Various examples showing how SELEN can
be configured to solve geodynamical problems involving past and present sea
level changes and current geodetic variations are also presented and discussed
Parallel HOP: A Scalable Halo Finder for Massive Cosmological Data Sets
Modern N-body cosmological simulations contain billions () of dark
matter particles. These simulations require hundreds to thousands of gigabytes
of memory, and employ hundreds to tens of thousands of processing cores on many
compute nodes. In order to study the distribution of dark matter in a
cosmological simulation, the dark matter halos must be identified using a halo
finder, which establishes the halo membership of every particle in the
simulation. The resources required for halo finding are similar to the
requirements for the simulation itself. In particular, simulations have become
too extensive to use commonly-employed halo finders, such that the
computational requirements to identify halos must now be spread across multiple
nodes and cores. Here we present a scalable-parallel halo finding method called
Parallel HOP for large-scale cosmological simulation data. Based on the halo
finder HOP, it utilizes MPI and domain decomposition to distribute the halo
finding workload across multiple compute nodes, enabling analysis of much
larger datasets than is possible with the strictly serial or previous parallel
implementations of HOP. We provide a reference implementation of this method as
a part of the toolkit yt, an analysis toolkit for Adaptive Mesh Refinement
(AMR) data that includes complementary analysis modules. Additionally, we
discuss a suite of benchmarks that demonstrate that this method scales well up
to several hundred tasks and datasets in excess of particles. The
Parallel HOP method and our implementation can be readily applied to any kind
of N-body simulation data and is therefore widely applicable.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, 2 table
Libpsht - algorithms for efficient spherical harmonic transforms
Libpsht (or "library for Performant Spherical Harmonic Transforms") is a
collection of algorithms for efficient conversion between spatial-domain and
spectral-domain representations of data defined on the sphere. The package
supports transforms of scalars as well as spin-1 and spin-2 quantities, and can
be used for a wide range of pixelisations (including HEALPix, GLESP and ECP).
It will take advantage of hardware features like multiple processor cores and
floating-point vector operations, if available. Even without this additional
acceleration, the employed algorithms are among the most efficient (in terms of
CPU time as well as memory consumption) currently being used in the
astronomical community.
The library is written in strictly standard-conforming C90, ensuring
portability to many different hard- and software platforms, and allowing
straightforward integration with codes written in various programming languages
like C, C++, Fortran, Python etc.
Libpsht is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License
(GPL) version 2 and can be downloaded from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libpsht.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted by A&
Simulation and control engineering studies of NASA-Ames 40 foot by 80 foot/80 foot by 120 foot wind tunnels
The development and use of a digital computer simulation of the proposed wind tunnel facility is described. The feasibility of automatic control of wind tunnel airspeed and other parameters was examined. Specifications and implementation recommendations for a computer based automatic control and monitoring system are presented
Off-line computing for experimental high-energy physics
The needs of experimental high-energy physics for large-scale computing and data handling are explained in terms of the complexity of individual collisions and the need for high statistics to study quantum mechanical processes. The prevalence of university-dominated collaborations adds a requirement for high-performance wide-area networks. The data handling and computational needs of the different types of large experiment, now running or under construction, are evaluated. Software for experimental high-energy physics is reviewed briefly with particular attention to the success of packages written within the discipline. It is argued that workstations and graphics are important in ensuring that analysis codes are correct, and the worldwide networks which support the involvement of remote physicists are described. Computing and data handling are reviewed showing how workstations and RISC processors are rising in importance but have not supplanted traditional mainframe processing. Examples of computing systems constructed within high-energy physics are examined and evaluated
The MOLDY short-range molecular dynamics package
We describe a parallelised version of the MOLDY molecular dynamics program.
This Fortran code is aimed at systems which may be described by short-range
potentials and specifically those which may be addressed with the embedded atom
method. This includes a wide range of transition metals and alloys. MOLDY
provides a range of options in terms of the molecular dynamics ensemble used
and the boundary conditions which may be applied. A number of standard
potentials are provided, and the modular structure of the code allows new
potentials to be added easily. The code is parallelised using OpenMP and can
therefore be run on shared memory systems, including modern multicore
processors. Particular attention is paid to the updates required in the main
force loop, where synchronisation is often required in OpenMP implementations
of molecular dynamics. We examine the performance of the parallel code in
detail and give some examples of applications to realistic problems, including
the dynamic compression of copper and carbon migration in an iron-carbon alloy
HARES: an efficient method for first-principles electronic structure calculations of complex systems
We discuss our new implementation of the Real-space Electronic Structure
method for studying the atomic and electronic structure of infinite periodic as
well as finite systems, based on density functional theory. This improved
version which we call HARES (for High-performance-fortran Adaptive grid
Real-space Electronic Structure) aims at making the method widely applicable
and efficient, using high performance Fortran on parallel architectures. The
scaling of various parts of a HARES calculation is analyzed and compared to
that of plane-wave based methods. The new developments that lead to enhanced
performance, and their parallel implementation, are presented in detail. We
illustrate the application of HARES to the study of elemental crystalline
solids, molecules and complex crystalline materials, such as blue bronze and
zeolites.Comment: 17 two-column pages, including 9 figures, 5 tables. To appear in
Computer Physics Communications. Several minor revisions based on feedbac
Kranc: a Mathematica application to generate numerical codes for tensorial evolution equations
We present a suite of Mathematica-based computer-algebra packages, termed
"Kranc", which comprise a toolbox to convert (tensorial) systems of partial
differential evolution equations to parallelized C or Fortran code. Kranc can
be used as a "rapid prototyping" system for physicists or mathematicians
handling very complicated systems of partial differential equations, but
through integration into the Cactus computational toolkit we can also produce
efficient parallelized production codes. Our work is motivated by the field of
numerical relativity, where Kranc is used as a research tool by the authors. In
this paper we describe the design and implementation of both the Mathematica
packages and the resulting code, we discuss some example applications, and
provide results on the performance of an example numerical code for the
Einstein equations.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure. Corresponds to journal versio
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