Rayleigh is a 3-D convection code designed for the study of dynamo behavior in spherical geometry. It evolves the incompressible and anelastic MHD equations in spherical geometry using a pseudo-spectral approach. Rayleigh employs spherical harmonics in the horizontal direction and Chebyshev polynomials in the radial direction. The code has undergone extensive accuracy testing using the Christensen et al. (2001) Boussinesq benchmarks and the Jones et al. (2011) anelastic benchmarks. Rayleigh has been developed with NSF support through the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG).
The pseudo-spectral nature of Rayleigh means that its parallelization necessarily relies heavily on global communication patterns. That said, Rayleigh's parallelization is based around a 2-D domain decomposition and large-message-size all-to-alls. These features allow the code to overcome many of the obstacles that traditionally limit the scalability of spectral methods. The end result is a pseudo-spectral code optimized for petascale machines. Rayleigh's pure-MPI mode has demonstrated highly efficient strong scaling on 131,000 cores of the Mira Blue Gene/Q supercomputer for problems with approximately 2048^3 grid points (2048 spherical harmonics). Performance numbers from Mira are shown below. A summary of Rayleigh's performance and how it compares against other popular dynamo codes (albeit at at smaller process counts) may be found in the recent performance benchmark results of Matsui et al. (2016).
The following documents form the initial Rayleigh documentation. Note that the html version of the Diagnostics_Plotting document, which is automatically generated from a Jupyter notebook, is more cleanly formatted than the pdf version.
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| INSTALL | in-depth installation instructions |
| doc/Rayleigh_User_Guide.pdf | Overview of compiling and running Rayleigh |
| doc/Diagnostic_Plotting.{html,pdf} | Guide to generating and plotting Rayleigh output (text version) |
| etc/analysis/Diagnostic_Plotting.ipynb | Same as above (interactive Jupyter notebook) |
| doc/Rayleigh_Output_Variables.pdf | Tables of Rayleigh output menu codes |
Rayleigh was written by Nicholas Featherstone with NSF support through CIG. Please see the ACKNOWLEDGEMENT file for citation information.
Raleigh v0.9.1 is released under the GPL v3 license.