Building an Open-Source Collaborative Software Ecosystem for Space and Laboratory Plasma Simulations

From the plasma environment around planets and black-holes, to confined plasmas in fusion machines, plasmas are ubiquitous in the visible universe. Computer simulations are critical to understand, and in the case of laboratory plasmas, design, such complex systems. Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) program we are building an open-source, collaborative software ecosystem to provide advanced simulation capabilities to the whole plasma physics community. This ecosystem consists of two major parts: a core simulation engine with several advanced solvers, and a Plasma Science Virtual Laboratory to allow access to these tools via an easy-to-use web interace. The simulation engine is built on top of the open-source Gkeyll framework and provides solvers for multifluid, multimoment equations and the Vlasov-Maxwell equations in its various manifestations. The Plasma Science Virtual Laboratory is designed to broaden researcher and educator access to plasma science and space weather analysis on high performance computing platforms. It supports creation and execution of automated workflows that run on multiple NSF ACCESS compute systems without burdening users with execution, storage, and access details of each system. Our project aims to be community driven and welcomes enhancements via new solvers, improvements to existing code, updates to documentation via github pull-requests or issue creation.