Development of GPU-enabled high-order solver for simulating solar plasmas with adaptive mesh refinement.

Solar activity is at the origin of time and space varying conditions governing the environment of the solar system and resulting in what is referred to as Space Weather (SW). The eruptive events in the solar atmosphere are generally associated with the ejection of large amounts of magnetized plasma into interplanetary space at velocities up to several thousand kilometres per second. The latter phenomena, called Coronal Mass Ejections, are considered the main cause of most severe SW events, able to damage both space-borne and ground-based infrastructures when interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere. In order to allow for mitigating such threatening phenomena, numerical prediction tools require advanced physical models and computational methods able to properly characterize all relevant phenomena providing more accurate and considerably faster results matching observational data. The proposed research project aims to deliver a new-generation data-driven solver relying upon the most advanced models (including the multi-component nature of solar plasmas) using modern high-order methods and novel adaptive mesh refinement algorithms to enable accurate characterization of the solar corona. The newly developed code will be also compatible with high-performance computing architectures (e.g. GPUs) for a further boost in run-time performance and will be used to run realistic solar corona simulations providing more reliable input to the heliospheric SW forecasting tool EUHFORIA.