Branch Prediction and Speculative Execution (BPSE): A Data Assimilaton Scheme for Space Weather

Although Space Weather is modeled after Tropospheric weather, both in its conception as a weather system and in our efforts to forecast it, no capability exists today for assimilating magnetospheric data into Space Weather simulations. The proposed project will develop the first such capability in Space Weather. Branch prediction and speculative execution consist of making probabilistic predictions about the likely evolution of the near-Earth space, and distributing among available computers a large number of simulations that assume each of the probabilistically estimated states as initial conditions. As the near-Earth space evolves and near-Earth satellite data are compared with the models, some of the speculatively executed simulations will be seen to diverge from the observations more than others. At that point the machines that were executing them will be reassigned to new lines of speculative simulation, resulting in a continuous ensemble of runs that are in the neighborhood of measured values.