NCSI: 3D PLUTO Simulations of Magnetized Massive-star Winds

Status	Completed
Mentor Name	Marc Gagne
Mentor's XSEDE Affiliation	Campus Champion Allocation
Mentor Has Been in XSEDE Community	Less than 1 year
Project Title	3D PLUTO Simulations of Magnetized Massive-star Winds
Summary	Massive stars are the progenitors of supernovae, neutron stars and black holes, and they are critical to the evolution of galaxies. Almost 10% of massive stars have strong, bipolar magnetic fields. These stars are thought to be the progenitors of highly magnetic neutrons stars (magnetars). This project aims to realistically model the mass outflows from these magnetic massive stars. We will use the PLUTO code with Chombo-3.2 adaptive mesh refinement and HDF5 libraries to numerically model these single and binary star systems.
Job Description	The undergraduate student will learn about high-performance computing, run jobs with MPI, visualize simulations with VisIt, and modify initialization scripts to modify the simulations. The student will focus on one star system, with the goal of using the 3D final simulations to predict the time-variable X-ray spectra from this star. The student will be expected to present the results of her research apprenticeship at a national or regional astrophysics conference.
Computational Resources	West Chester University Campus Champion allocation Startup allocation Research allocation (pending) RM Bridges PSC
Contribution to Community
Position Type	Apprentice
Training Plan	The faculty mentor will provide necessary training to understand code, underlying physics, and how to compile code in parallel architectures. Student should have a background in basic physics and astronomy, with some computer programming experience. If selected, I believe the student would benefit enormously from the Blue Waters Student Internship Program: PETASCALE INSTITUTE.
Student Prerequisites/Conditions/Qualifications	None.
Duration	Summer
Start Date	06/17/2019
End Date	08/23/2019