NERSC Initiative for Scientific Exploration (NISE) 2010 Awards

3-D Radiation/Hydrodynamic Modeling on Parallel Architectures

Adam Burrows, Princeton University

Associated NERSC Project: Computational Astrophysics Consortium (m106), Principal Investigator: Stan Woosley, University of California, Santa Cruz

Radiation transport in a multi-dimensional context is a difficult problem that nevertheless finds ubiquitous application in astrophysics. The supernova explosion phenomenon is one such dramatic example, wherein 3-D effects may be crucial to the outcome and a key to the mechanism of explosion. However, such simulations over the many timesteps necessary to illuminate the problem are very computationally expensive. Hence, the development and testing of efficient algorithms that scale to many processors is an important desideratum for the efficient computational exploration of the supernova phenomenon. This proposal is to address this computational issue and help improve and test a new 3-D radiation algorithm and its implementation.