Project Title: Fast simulation of marine biogenic particles on programmable GPUs
Supervisor(s): Samar Khatiwala, Department of Earth Sciences
Objectives: Develop and apply novel mathematical and computational approaches to simulate the transport of Lagrangianparticles in the ocean.
Project description:
Marine particles are increasingly recognized to play a fundamental in global biogeochemical cycles. For instance, the sinking of organic matter produced by photosynthesizing phytoplankton at the surface of the ocean transport large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere into the deep ocean, a process known as the “biological carbon pump”. Such particles also scavenge and transport trace elements, thus playing a key role in their geochemical cycling. However, mostexisting oceanmodels are Eulerian in nature (i.e., are designed to represent tracer concentrations) and are thus unsuitedto simulate the fundamentallydiscrete and Lagrangiannature of these particles. The objective of this project is to develop and apply novel mathematical and computational approaches to efficiently simulate marine particles with a conventional Eulerian ocean circulation model. The key insight is to interpret the (deterministic) transport of tracers simulated by these models as probabilities that govern where a particle is likely to move. The student will both explore the mathematical underpinnings of this idea as well as develop computational algorithms to make it feasible to apply it to a large number (O(1012)) of particles in a realistic, global ocean circulation model. The algorithms will be designed to exploit many-core architectures such as programmable,general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) that are increasingly used in scientific computing.GPGPUs are not only capable of extreme parallelism but are very efficient at tasks such as random number generation (a critical requirement for the proposed approach). Usingthe GPU clusterat Oxford’s Advanced Research Computing Centre, the student will test and apply the new algorithms to perform the first global simulation of marine biogenic particles.
Prerequisites:Undergraduate in maths, physics or computer science with excellent computing skills and willingness to get their hands dirty.
Please indicate as appropriate:
Yes, Ihave funding from MOAP for a summer student.