Engineering topics

Karimabadi, Homa

Publications and source records attributed to Karimabadi, Homa.

7 records

DOE OSTI2017

The role of guide field on magnetic reconnection during island coalescence

A number of studies have considered how the rate of magnetic reconnection scales in large and weakly collisional systems by the modelling of long reconnecting current sheets. However, this set-up neglects both the formation of the current sheet and the coupling between the diffusion region and a larger system that supplies the magnetic flux. Recent studies of magnetic island merging, which naturally include these features, have found that ion kinetic physics is crucial to describe the reconnection rate and global evolution of such systems. In this paper, the effect of a guide field on reconnection during island merging is considered. In contrast to the earlier current sheet studies, we identify a limited range of guide fields for which the reconnection rate, outflow velocity, and pile-up magnetic field increase in magnitude as the guide field increases. The Hall-MHD fluid model is found to reproduce kinetic reconnection rates only for a sufficiently strong guide field, for which ion inertia breaks the frozen-in condition and the outflow becomes Alfvénic in the kinetic system. The merging of large islands occurs on a longer timescale in the zero guide field limit, which may in part be due to a mirror-like instability that occurs upstream of the reconnection region.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2015

Role of Ion Kinetic Physics in the Interaction of Magnetic Flux Ropes

To explain many natural magnetized plasma phenomena, it is crucial to understand how rates of collisionless magnetic reconnection scale in large magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) scale systems. Simulations of isolated current sheets conclude such rates are independent of system size and can be reproduced by the Hall-MHD model, but neglect sheet formation and coupling to MHD scales. Here in this study, it is shown for the problem of flux-rope merging, which includes this formation and coupling, that the Hall-MHD model fails to reproduce the kinetic results. The minimum sufficient model must retain ion kinetic effects, which set the ion diffusion region geometry and give time-averaged rates that reduce significantly with system size, leading to different global evolution in large systems.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2014

EMAPS: An Efficient Multiscale Approach to Plasma Systems with Non-MHD Scale Effects

Using Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) as a novel paradigm for time integration of large-scale physics-driven systems, we have achieved significant breakthroughs in simulations of multi-dimensional magnetized plasmas where ion kinetic and finite Larmor radius (FLR) and Hall effects play a crucial role. For these purposes we apply a unique asynchronous simulation tool: a parallel, electromagnetic Particle-in-Cell (PIC) code, HYPERS (Hybrid Particle Event-Resolved Simulator), which treats plasma electrons as a charge neutralizing fluid and solves a self-consistent set of non-radiative Maxwell, electron fluid equations and ion particle equations on a structured computational grid. HYPERS enables adaptive local time steps for particles, fluid elements and electromagnetic fields. This ensures robustness (stability) and efficiency (speed) of highly dynamic and nonlinear simulations of compact plasma systems such spheromaks, FRCs, ion beams and edge plasmas. HYPERS is a unique asynchronous code that has been designed to serve as a test bed for developing multi-physics applications not only for laboratory plasma devices but generally across a number of plasma physics fields, including astrophysics, space physics and electronic devices. We have made significant improvements to the HYPERS core: (1) implemented a new asynchronous magnetic field integration scheme that preserves local divB=0 to within round-off errors; (2) Improved staggered-grid discretizations of electric and magnetic fields. These modifications have significantly enhanced the accuracy and robustness of 3D simulations. We have conducted first-ever end-to-end 3D simulations of merging spheromak plasmas. The preliminary results show: (1) tilt-driven relaxation of a freely expanding spheromak to an m=1 Taylor helix configuration and (2) possibility of formation of a tilt-stable field-reversed configuration via merging and magnetic reconnection of two double-sided spheromaks with opposite helicities.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2014

A Screen Space GPGPU Surface LIC Algorithm for Distributed Memory Data Parallel Sort Last Rendering Infrastructures

The surface line integral convolution(LIC) visualization technique produces dense visualization of vector fields on arbitrary surfaces. We present a screen space surface LIC algorithm for use in distributed memory data parallel sort last rendering infrastructures. The motivations for our work are to support analysis of datasets that are too large to fit in the main memory of a single computer and compatibility with prevalent parallel scientific visualization tools such as ParaView and VisIt. By working in screen space using OpenGL we can leverage the computational power of GPUs when they are available and run without them when they are not. We address efficiency and performance issues that arise from the transformation of data from physical to screen space by selecting an alternate screen space domain decomposition. We analyze the algorithm's scaling behavior with and without GPUs on two high performance computing systems using data from turbulent plasma simulations.

Loring, Burlen↗

NASA NTRS2012

Social Networking Adapted for Distributed Scientific Collaboration

Share is a social networking site with novel, specially designed feature sets to enable simultaneous remote collaboration and sharing of large data sets among scientists. The site will include not only the standard features found on popular consumer-oriented social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, but also a number of powerful tools to extend its functionality to a science collaboration site. A Virtual Observatory is a promising technology for making data accessible from various missions and instruments through a Web browser. Sci-Share augments services provided by Virtual Observatories by enabling distributed collaboration and sharing of downloaded and/or processed data among scientists. This will, in turn, increase science returns from NASA missions. Sci-Share also enables better utilization of NASA s high-performance computing resources by providing an easy and central mechanism to access and share large files on users space or those saved on mass storage. The most common means of remote scientific collaboration today remains the trio of e-mail for electronic communication, FTP for file sharing, and personalized Web sites for dissemination of papers and research results. Each of these tools has well-known limitations. Sci-Share transforms the social networking paradigm into a scientific collaboration environment by offering powerful tools for cooperative discourse and digital content sharing. Sci-Share differentiates itself by serving as an online repository for users digital content with the following unique features: a) Sharing of any file type, any size, from anywhere; b) Creation of projects and groups for controlled sharing; c) Module for sharing files on HPC (High Performance Computing) sites; d) Universal accessibility of staged files as embedded links on other sites (e.g. Facebook) and tools (e.g. e-mail); e) Drag-and-drop transfer of large files, replacing awkward e-mail attachments (and file size limitations); f) Enterprise-level data and messaging encryption; and g) Easy-to-use intuitive workflow.

Karimabadi, Homa↗

NASA NTRS2012

Secure Peer-to-Peer Networks for Scientific Information Sharing

The most common means of remote scientific collaboration today includes the trio of e-mail for electronic communication, FTP for file sharing, and personalized Web sites for dissemination of papers and research results. With the growth of broadband Internet, there has been a desire to share large files (movies, files, scientific data files) over the Internet. Email has limits on the size of files that can be attached and transmitted. FTP is often used to share large files, but this requires the user to set up an FTP site for which it is hard to set group privileges, it is not straightforward for everyone, and the content is not searchable. Peer-to-peer technology (P2P), which has been overwhelmingly successful in popular content distribution, is the basis for development of a scientific collaboratory called Scientific Peer Network (SciPerNet). This technology combines social networking with P2P file sharing. SciPerNet will be a standalone application, written in Java and Swing, thus insuring portability to a number of different platforms. Some of the features include user authentication, search capability, seamless integration with a data center, the ability to create groups and social networks, and on-line chat. In contrast to P2P networks such as Gnutella, Bit Torrent, and others, SciPerNet incorporates three design elements that are critical to application of P2P for scientific purposes: User authentication, Data integrity validation, Reliable searching SciPerNet also provides a complementary solution to virtual observatories by enabling distributed collaboration and sharing of downloaded and/or processed data among scientists. This will, in turn, increase scientific returns from NASA missions. As such, SciPerNet can serve a two-fold purpose for NASA: a cost-savings software as well as a productivity tool for scientists working with data from NASA missions.

Karimabadi, Homa↗

NASA NTRS2012

Physics Mining of Multi-Source Data Sets

Powerful new parallel data mining algorithms can produce diagnostic and prognostic numerical models and analyses from observational data. These techniques yield higher-resolution measures than ever before of environmental parameters by fusing synoptic imagery and time-series measurements. These techniques are general and relevant to observational data, including raster, vector, and scalar, and can be applied in all Earth- and environmental science domains. Because they can be highly automated and are parallel, they scale to large spatial domains and are well suited to change and gap detection. This makes it possible to analyze spatial and temporal gaps in information, and facilitates within-mission replanning to optimize the allocation of observational resources. The basis of the innovation is the extension of a recently developed set of algorithms packaged into MineTool to multi-variate time-series data. MineTool is unique in that it automates the various steps of the data mining process, thus making it amenable to autonomous analysis of large data sets. Unlike techniques such as Artificial Neural Nets, which yield a blackbox solution, MineTool's outcome is always an analytical model in parametric form that expresses the output in terms of the input variables. This has the advantage that the derived equation can then be used to gain insight into the physical relevance and relative importance of the parameters and coefficients in the model. This is referred to as physics-mining of data. The capabilities of MineTool are extended to include both supervised and unsupervised algorithms, handle multi-type data sets, and parallelize it.

Helly, John↗