Dr. Gevorg Poghosyan (KIT Karlsruhe)

Advanced Support for Simulations in Astro- and Elementary Particle Physics

The adaptation of off-the-shelf scientific simulation codes into up-to-date HPC and distributed computing infrastructures leads to essential changes in the scientific simulation code. For integrating of scientific application software into modern e-Infrastructures, simulation laboratories (SimLab) are established at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) of the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. We have parallelized the Monte Carlo code CORSIKA to master the challenges of simulations of an Extensive Air Showers initiated by cosmic ray particles in the atmosphere at the highest energies of 100 Exa-eV (10^20 eV). During the past 20 years a code CORSIKA has been developed at KIT and became a standard instrument for scientists, studying the EAS induced by cosmic rays. But simulation of EAS induced by ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with energies as high as 1020 Exa eV with the present version of CORSIKA applicable for sequential runs only, could take decades on single computers. We have implemented workflow system for parallel execution of CORSIKA on distributed and supercomputing infrastructures. The preliminary test simulations on local cluster of Steinbuch Centre for Computing with 1500 cores, at initial energies of cosmic rays up to 1 Exa eV, allowed us to estimate computational needs and challenges for large scale, productive simulations at higher energies, as about 100k CPU hours per UHECR.