AGATE

Version: 0

The AGATE plasma simulation code, part of the Magnetosphere-Aurora Boundary Layer Explorer (MARBLE) project, is an ongoing effort to solve the kinetic Hall Magnetohydrodynamics equations within a planetary magnetosphere. AGATE implements a finite-volume scheme to solve ideal, Hall, and CGL MHD on multiple distributed processors with both CPU and GPU acceleration.

Currently, AGATE only supports Cartesian grids with external boundary conditions; it will be extended for planetary magnetospheres in a future release.

Caveats:

AGATE does not currently support global magnetosphere simulations, though it will soon.

Inputs

AGATE requires the definition of a grid, a plasma state initial condition, and a model configuration. These can either be defined within a Python script or loaded from HDF5 files.

Outputs

AGATE outputs HDF5 files with plasma state data (density, momentum vector, total energy, pressure(s), magnetic field vector). Grid information is contained in separate HDF5 files.

Model is time-dependent.

Change Log

Spring 2025: Version 0.0.4 is the first released version

Domains

Heliosphere / Inner Heliosphere
Heliosphere / Outer Heliosphere
Magnetosphere / Global Magnetosphere
Local Physics

Phenomena

Ambient Solar Wind
Interplanetary Shocks
Plasma Sheet
Magnetosheath
Magnetotail Dynamics
Plasmoids
Bursty Bulk Flows
Kelvin-Helmholtz Instabilities
Magnetic Reconnection

Publications

High-Performance Computational Magnetohydrodynamics with Python

Code

Code Languages: Python

Contacts

Chris Bard, NASA GSFC (Model Developer)
John Dorelli, NASA GSFC (Model Contact)
Lutz Rastaetter, NASA GSFC CCMC (CCMC Model Host)
Masha Kuznetsova, NASA GSFC CCMC (CCMC Model Host)

Publication Policy

In addition to any model-specific policy, please refer to the General Publication Policy.