Parallel computation of magnetic fluxtube reconnection

Reconnection of magnetic fluxtubes is an important energy conversion process in many solar coronal events. We here describe several recent advances that we have made in the numerical simulation of this process. The numerical simulations are carried out using a new version of our algorithm for solving the viscoresistive equations of compressible magnetohydrodynamics. The algorithm has been parallelized for the Connection Machine CM5. We present numerical simulations at a resolution of 1283 Fourier modes of the reconnection of initially orthogonal, uniform twist, force-free, magnetic fluxtubes. We describe the physical model and some preliminary simulation results. A discussion of parallelism issues related to our algorithm is also presented.