ASC-FLASH Center
Don Lamb, PI
Goals: The aim of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes is to solve the longstanding problem of thermonuclear flashes on the surfaces of compact stars, such as neutron stars and white dwarfs, and the interior of white dwarfs (i.e., Type Ia supernovae).
Significance: While technically not hosted by CI, the ASCI-FLASH center is tightly entwined with many CI faculty and has in fact served as an excellent model to demonstrate how investment and commitment to large scale computation can have transformational effects at the University and Argonne, and worldwide. The Center is based at the University of Chicago, and involves collaboration between faculty and staff from several University of Chicago departments and institutes, the Mathematics and Computer Science division of Argonne National Laboratory, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; we also collaborate with a number of individual scientists at other institutions, including the University of Arizona, the University of California at Santa Cruz, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and the three DOE/DP laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory. We are proud to be one of five Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP) centers.
Accomplishments: The Center includes leading physicists in the fields of nuclear astrophysics, condensed matter physics, statistical physics and complexity theory, structure and evolution of compact stars, and astrophysical (computational) hydrodynamics and convection; computational scientists with expertise in the appropriate implementation of the physics, algorithm development, and parallelization; and computer scientists widely recognized for innovation in the development of parallel numerical methods, portable programming environments for scalable and distributed computing, parallel I/O, and immersive three-dimensional visualization. This core group includes scientists at the UofCmanaged Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), who have unique capabilities in many of the areas of parallel computing essential to this project; as well as computer scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute expert in the key computer science research areas of adaptive mesh refinement and unstructured meshes.
