TACC Supercomputers Power Quest for Space Weather Prediction

Providing information about Fortran in languages other than English has been discussed here. Toth (cited below) has Fortran 90 for physicists, undergraduate course notes in Hungarian .

TACC Supercomputers Power Quest for Space Weather Prediction

By Oliver Peckham
HPCWire
August 11, 2021

“There are only two natural disasters that could impact the entire U.S.,” said Gabor Toth, a professor of climate and space science at the University of Michigan, in an interview with Aaron Dubrow for the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). “One is a pandemic and the other is an extreme space weather event. … We have all these technological assets that are at risk. If an extreme event like the one in 1859 happened again, it would completely destroy the power grid and satellite and communications systems – the stakes are much higher.”

Toth works on the foremost space weather prediction model, which is simply called the Geospace Model. The Geospace Model, which operates under the auspices of NASA’s Space Weather with Quantified Uncertainties (SWQU) program, simulates the magnetohydrodynamics surrounding Earth, predicting planetside disturbances based on the solar winds. The Geospace Model was updated to version 2.0 in February of this year.

Currently, the team is also working on getting the Geospace Model to run better on modern, heterogeneous supercomputers. They recently ported the Geospace Model to GPUs using Nvidia’s Fortran compiler, allowing them to run the full model faster than real time – and faster than 100 CPU cores – using a single GPU on TACC’s Longhorn system. “It took a whole year of code development to make this happen,” Toth said.

4 Likes

Around 2015-2016, I remember about half of TACC supercomputing applications were in Fortran according to TACC scientists.

2 Likes

Any idea of this code is available somewhere we can see it?