Mahti pilot project: How does small-scale dynamo action occur in the Sun?

The new Finnish supercomputer "Mahti" is to be deployed, after an acceptance phase, to general usage soon. CSC's Scientific Customer Panel selected 22 projects that will be run as CSC's Mahti Pilot Projects during the acceptance phase starting in 6th of July 2020. SOLSTAR group members are actively participating in one of the projects, running models of the solar small-scale dynamo, that will use 65,536 cores and consuming 36 million CPU hours.

We model the generation of small-scale magnetic fields by means of direct simulations of the equations of isothermal magnetohydrodynamics. We particularly address the question of small-scale field generation in systems where the smallest scales of velocity and magnetic fields are widely separated. This is the case, for example, in the Sun where the plasma velocity has much smaller structures than the magnetic field, and whose magnetic field generation mechanisms are poorly understood. This hinders the full understanding of its magnetic activity manifestations and hence the possible mitigation of their impact onto civilization. The envisaged solar-like regime is very challenging to study numerically because huge spatial resolutions are required. We attack this problem with the largest simulations of their kind in the world running with 65,536 cores and using up to 36 million CPU hours. Read the related press release at CSC.