This is a project which is currently making use of HPC facilities at Newcastle University. It is active.
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We perform numerical simulations of convection in the outer core of the Earth as well as in the interiors of the gaseous giants Jupiter and Saturn, and investigate how magnetic field is being generated in these planets. Specific topics of our study include: geomagnetic reversals, secular variation of Jupiter's magnetic field and the effects of an internal stably stratified layer on Saturn's magnetic field.
The codes used in the project are the Leeds Dynamo Code (written in Fortran) and XSHELLS (written in C++). Both codes use the spectral method to solve a set of magnetohydrodynamics equations in a rotating spherical geometry. A fast Fourier transform library, such as the FFTW, is employed. The parallelisation can be done in a pure MPI mode or in a hybrid MPI+OpenMP mode.