Planetary Dynamo Simulation Explorer : a filterable and visualisable web-based, community-driven catalogue

Despite the constant improvement in the performance-to-power ratio of various components, particularly since the graphics cards, these numerical simulations incur a significant energy cost, resulting in substantial CO₂ emissions. Thus, in addition to the scientific value of collecting and analysing all available data, it seems necessary to identify which simulations have already been carried out to avoid duplicating calculations. This environmentally-sound approach enables the community to align with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This effort is being led by the ‘FAIR-MOD’ working group, initiated by Division 1 of the International Association for Geomagnetism and Aeronomy at the 2023 IUGG meeting [3].

For these reasons, we have developed a community-driven online catalogue of published simulations of the dynamo in planetary cores, listing numerous relevant criteria and diagnostics (e.g. dimensionless input and output numbers) for simulations and providing links to the authors’ repositories containing accessible simulation data. In addition to cataloguing the available articles, the tool offers a graphical interface allowing users to visualise the parameter space and thus compare all the simulations with one another. Users can plot various scaling laws proposed in the literature and define new auxiliary quantities to visualise them. This newly compiled data could thus enable the identification of new scaling laws.

A recurring difficulty when comparing different calculations stems from the variety of configurations in the simulations’ parameterisation (particularly for the dynamic forcing of buoyancy). To this end, the article highlights a framework for comparing these configuration-dependent quantities derived, and the need to document them unambiguously.

In the spirit of community collaboration, the entire code (in HTML5) is available as open source. The UGA hosts the website. Authors can submit their new (or existing) data in CSV format. We highlight that the article was published in JSEDI (Journal of Studies of Earth’s Deep Interior), a new journal from Episciences supported by the CNRS, INRIA and INRAE, a ‘diamond’ journal (free for all).