Parallelization of the SIR code for the investigation of small-scale features in the solar photosphere

Magnetic fields are one of the most important drivers of the highly dynamic processes that occur in the lower solar atmosphere. They span a broad range of sizes, from large- and intermediate-scale structures such as sunspots, pores and magnetic knots, down to the smallest magnetic elements observabl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 2014-12, Vol.10 (S305), p.251-256
Main Authors: Thonhofer, Stefan, Rubio, Luis R. Bellot, Utz, Dominik, Hanslmeier, Arnold, Jurçák, Jan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
Computation
Contributed Papers
Data analysis
Magnetic fields
Magnetic properties
Mathematical models
Parallel processing
Run time (computers)
Small scale
Solar atmosphere
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Summary:Magnetic fields are one of the most important drivers of the highly dynamic processes that occur in the lower solar atmosphere. They span a broad range of sizes, from large- and intermediate-scale structures such as sunspots, pores and magnetic knots, down to the smallest magnetic elements observable with current telescopes. On small scales, magnetic flux tubes are often visible as Magnetic Bright Points (MBPs). Apart from simple V/I magnetograms, the most common method to deduce their magnetic properties is the inversion of spectropolarimetric data. Here we employ the SIR code for that purpose. SIR is a well-established tool that can derive not only the magnetic field vector and other atmospheric parameters (e.g., temperature, line-of-sight velocity), but also their stratifications with height, effectively producing 3-dimensional models of the lower solar atmosphere. In order to enhance the runtime performance and the usability of SIR we parallelized the existing code and standardized the input and output formats. This and other improvements make it feasible to invert extensive high-resolution data sets within a reasonable amount of computing time. An evaluation of the speedup of the parallel SIR code shows a substantial improvement in runtime.
ISSN:1743-9213
1743-9221
DOI:10.1017/S1743921315004858