The Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA ...

The Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)Project

Frank Timmes School of Earth and Space Exploration

Arizona State University

Open Digital Infrastructure KITP 05jun2019

The MESA source code is a set of software modules for stellar astrophysics that can be used on their own, or combined to solve the coupled equations governing 1D stellar evolution with an implicit finite volume scheme.

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“Mother of All Demos”December 8, 1968

“The 90-minute presentation demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.”

Doug Engelbart Bill Paxton

After a PhD in computer science at Stanford

and a stint at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,

Bill became one of Adobe’s creators in 1983.

Bill helped invent scalable font technology.

The public facing part of this invention was

Postscript, which evolved into today’s PDF.

Bill retired from Adobe in 1990.

“Hello, my name is Bill Paxton. My I please use the tools posted on your website?”

January 8, 2005

Bill is MESA’s First Author and

a Senior Fellow in Computational Astrophysics at the KITP.

In 2010 MESA as an instrument was ready for release.

Time was spent planning for MESA’s possible future …

In 2010 stellar evolution software instruments were usually

closed source, closed knowledge, secret handshake, and

concentrated in ~10 locations around the world.

Yet, stellar astronomy was (and still is) booming with

new telescopes, missions, puzzles, and science.

There was a large pent-up demand for new stellar models.

Recognizing Opportunity

APPENDIX A

MANIFESTO

MESA was developed through the concerted efforts of thelead author over a six year period with the engagement anddeep involvement of many theoretical and computational astro-physicists. The public availability of MESA will serve education,scientific research, and outreach. This appendix describes thescientific motivation for MESA, the philosophy and rules of usefor MESA, and the path forward on stewardship of MESA, andadvanced development of future research and education tools.We make MESA openly available with the hope that it will growinto a community resource. We therefore consider it importantto explain the guiding principles for using and contributing toMESA. Our goal is to assure the greatest usefulness for thelargest number of research and educational projects.

Paxton et al, ApJS, 193, 3, 2011

South

PacificOcean

South

Atlantic

Ocean

North

Atlantic

Ocean

North

PacificOcean

Indian

Ocean

MESA : Community of ~1000, Jan 2019

+

Josiah Schwab

Evan Bauer

Rob Farmer

Warrick Ball

Anne Thoul

Bill Wolf

Pablo Marchant

Matteo CantielloRich Townsend Bill Paxton Lars BildstenFrank TimmesAaron Dotter

Radek SmolecAdam Jermyn

MI T

RSP STELLA

MESA

A thriving open-knowledge software project takes a village.

How does the MESA project innovate?

Multiple Instrument Papers

Usually there is one software instrument paper, occasionally two separated by decadal timescales.

We update the community with instrument papers describing new science capabilities about every two years.

2013

2018

2019

2015

2011MESA I

MESA II

MESA III

MESA IV

MESA V

Citations: 2,456

Citations to papers

that cite MESA: 37,645

Larger Science Community

MESA

InfluenceRadius ≈15

MESA I - Top 5 in 2011 MESA III - Top 5 in 2015

MESA IV - Top 30 in 2018 MESA II - Top 10 in 2013

Citations

0

300

600

900

2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

MESA I 2011

MESA II 2013

MESA III 2015

MESA IV 2018

Data from SAO/NASA ADS

Of the Top 10 most cited astro articles published in 2013, three are represented at our meeting.

We provide two portals to openly share knowledge.

MESA-Users offers over 10,000 archived and searchable

posts on community discussions of stellar astrophysics.

Actively Support the MESA Community

Nu

mb

er

of MESA

Use

r M

ess

ag

es

0

450

900

1350

1800

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

mesastar.org offers a Zenodo backed portal to share tools, inlists, guidance, and to build provenance.

Currently there are ~400 contributions by the community, for the community.

Pulsations:

Stars:

Pulsations:

Adipls

MESA

Support:

Support:

Nuclear:

WeakLib

Cyberhub:

NuGrid

Nuclear:

StarLib

Nuclear:

AZURE

3D hydro:

Castro3D hydro:

Athena

3D hydro:

FLASH

Dedalus

3D hydro:

MAESTRO

3D hydro:

PPMStar

3D hydro:Opacity:

Opacity:

ASTROBEAR

OP

OPLIB

3D hydro:

Changa

3D hydro:

ENZO

GAMMA

PyMESA

HYPATIA

VMESA

MESA-Script

Support:

Nuclear:

GCE:

Ports:

SYGMA

Yields:

Stars:

OMEGA

GCE:

Support:

JINABase

MESA-Test

3D hydro:

Phantom

3D hydro:

3D hydro:

Isochrones:

GYRE

N-Body:

Amuse

CMFGEN

Spectra:

Spectra:

CLOUDY

StarCrash

Education:

MESAWeb Support:

MESA-

Docker

Stars:

Dstar

Nuclear:

JINA

Reaclib

LIGO ASAS-SN ZTF NuSTARGaia LSSTLCO JWST TESS

Radiation:

STELLA

Stellar

Pulsations:

RSP

MI T

NSCL FRIB CASPAR SECAR St. George

Usually a forked source code is released when

people are not getting what they want.

We keep the pace of development high enough

that any fork quickly becomes outdated.

Num

ber

of MESA

Develo

per

Messag

es

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

2016 2017 2018 2019

NO BIT RØT

We provide a Software Development Kit to build

MESA across a variety of Unix-based platforms.

Make MESA Easy To Use

MESAsdk

Lead: Rich Townsend

MESA-Docker simplifies the requirements for locally running

a full installation, with only minor overhead from running in a

container. This is useful for new users and Windows users.

Lead: Evan Bauer

MESA-WEB is a web-based cloud resource for education

that has served 4000+ models to ~550 unique users in

3 years of operation.

http://mesa-web.asu.edu

Lead: Carl Fields

Building Our Next Generation

The MESA Summer School offers a week of extensive

hands-on labs to gain familiarity with MESA and learn how

to make better use of MESA in their own research.

The Summer School cadre of instructors, TAs and

participants (now over 250) are creating their own MESA

user infrastructure at ~40 institutions around the world.

0

15

30

45

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Grads Postdocs Undergrads Faculty Amateurs

47% Women

68% USA

39% Women

66% USA

28% Women

80% USA

33% Women

64% USA

31% Women

50% USA

42% Women

46% USA

31% Women

38% USA

We focus on supporting young scientists who are also

skilled at developing community software instruments to

obtain high-profile graduate fellowships (6), named postdoc

fellowships (6), and tenure-stream positions (5).

1Lesson: Market community rather than source code.

MESA Funding Profile

2011 $0 - Failure1

2013 $500K for 3 years from NSF2

2017 $3M for 4 years from NSF3

2019 $35K from Ford/Sloan3

2020 TBD (New Opportunities)

2Lesson: Quantify and brand all aspects of the project.

3Lesson: Build an ecosystem.

Community-driven software and data ecosystems that accelerate new science.

GYRE

R

JOSS

Astropy TOM TVS

Einstein

Toolkit

Dedalus

MESA

KROME

ASCLemcee

yt ATHENA

REACLIB

JETFIT

Librarys:

3D Hydro:

Nuclear:

GRB:

Journals:

Astronomy: Astronomy:

Relativity:

Analysis:

Visualization:

Analysis:

Stars:

Stars:

Chemistry:

People:

People:

People:

3D Hydro:

Ford + SloanFoundations

JINA-CEE

KITP

LIGO Hubble NuSTARLSST LCOGTGaia SDSS JWST TESS

Laboratory Astrophysics

Questions and Discussion

MESASTRAIGHT AHEAD