Overview

Rayleigh solves the MHD equations, in a rotating frame, within spherical shells, using the anelastic or Boussinesq approximations. Derivatives in Rayleigh are calculated using a spectral transform scheme. Spherical harmonics are used as basis functions in the horizontal direction. Chebyshev polynomials are employed in radius. Time-stepping is accomplished using the semi-implicit Crank-Nicolson method for the linear terms, and the Adams-Bashforth method for the nonlinear terms. Both methods are second-order in time.

This document serves as a guide to installation and running Rayleigh. Rayleigh’s diagnostics package is discussed in the companion document Diagnostic Values.

Referencing

We ask that you cite the appropriate references if you publish results that were obtained in some part using Rayleigh. To cite other versions of the code, please see: https://geodynamics.org/cig/abc

Please cite the code as:

Featherstone, N.A., Edelmann, P.V.F., Gassmoeller, R., Matilsky, L.I., Orvedahl, R.J. & Wilson, C.R., 2021, Rayleigh Version 1.0.1, Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5774039

@Software{featherstone_et_al_2022,
      author = "{Featherstone}, N.~A. and {Edelmann}, P.~V.~F. and {Gassmoeller}, R. and {Matilsky}, L.~I. and {Orvedahl}, R.~J. and {Wilson}, C.~R.",
      title="Rayleigh 1.1.0",
      year="2022",
      organization="",
      optkeywords="Rayleigh",
      doi="http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5805063",
      opturl="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5805063"}

Please also cite the following references:

Featherstone, N.A.; Hindman, B.W. (2016), The spectral amplitude of stellar convection and its scaling in the high-rayleigh-number regime, The Astrophysical Journal, 818 (1) , 32, DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/818/1/32

Matsui, H. et al., 2016, Performance benchmarks for a next generation numerical dynamo model, Geochem., Geophys., Geosys., 17,1586 DOI: 10.1002/2015GC006159

@Article{,
author = "Featherstone, N.A. and Hindman, B.W.",
title="The Spectral Amplitude Of Stellar Convection And Its Scaling In The High-Rayleigh-Number Regime",
year="2016",
journal="The Astrophysical Journal",
volume="818",
number="1",
pages="32",
optkeywords="Rayleigh",
issn="1538-4357",
doi="http://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/818/1/32",
opturl="http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/818/i=1/a=32?key=
crossref.a90f82507dd0eeb7a6e7562d1e4b0210"}

@Article{Matsui_etal_2016,
author = "Matsui, H. and Heien, E. and Aubert, J. and Aurnou, J.M. and Avery, M. and Brown, B. and Buffett, B.A. and Busse, F. and Christensen, U.R. and Davies, C.J. and Featherstone, N. and Gastine, T. and Glatzmaier, G.A. and Gubbins, D. and Guermond, J.-L. and Hayashi, Y.-Y. and Hollerbach, R. and Hwang, L.J. and Jackson, A. and Jones, C.A. and Jiang, W. and Kellogg, L.H. and Kuang, W. and Landeau, M. and Marti, P.H. and Olson, P. and Ribeiro, A. and Sasaki, Y. and Schaeffer, N. and Simitev, R.D. and Sheyko, A. and Silva, L. and Stanley, S. and Takahashi, F. and Takehiro, S.-ichi and Wicht, J. and Willis, A.P.",
title="Performance benchmarks for a next generation numerical dynamo model",
year="2016",
journal="Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems",
volume="17",
number="5",
pages="1586-1607",
optkeywords="Calypso",
issn="1525-2027",
doi="http://doi.org/10.1002/2015GC006159",
opturl="http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/2015GC006159"
}

Rayleigh’s development is supported by the National Science Foundation through the Geodynamo Working Group of the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG, https://geodynamics.org/cig/working-groups/geodynamo/).

Please acknowledge CIG support in your work as follows:

Note

Rayleigh is hosted and receives support from the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) which is supported by the National Science Foundation awards NSF-0949446 and NSF-1550901.

Acknowledging

Rayleigh was originally developed by Nicholas Featherstone.

Since then many more people have contributed and Rayleigh has grown into a project with many authors. A complete and growing list can be found at: https://github.com/geodynamics/Rayleigh/graphs/contributors.

Rayleigh’s primary developers are:

  • Nicholas Featherstone

  • Philipp Edelmann

  • Rene Gassmoeller

  • Loren Matilsky

  • Ryan Orvedahl

  • Cian Wilson

Special thanks to Michael Calkins, Moritz Heimpel, Bradley Hindman, Wei Jiang, Ryan Orvedahl, Krista Soderlund, and Rakesh Yadav for their intensive beta testing of early version of the Rayleigh code.

Rayleigh’s implementation of the pseudo-spectral algorithm and its parallel design would not have been possible without earlier work by Gary Glatzmaier and Thomas Clune described in: [Gla84], [GCE+99]

Glatzmaier, G.A., 1984, Numerical simulations of stellar convective dynamos. I. the model and method, J. Comp. Phys., 55(3), 461-484. ISSN 0021-9991, doi:10.1016/0021-9991(84)90033-0.

Clune, T.C., Elliott, J.R., Miesch, M.S.,Toomre, J., and Glatzmaier, G.A., 1999, Computational aspects of a code to study rotating turbulent convection in spherical shells, Parallel Comp., 25, 361-380.