Messer OCI 0749248 Blondin OCI 0749204 Marronetti
The advent of petascale computing brings with it the promise of substantial increases in physical fidelity for a host of scientific problems, but the architectural features of petascale machines will require considerable innovation for effective use. This three-part collaborative project addresses several of the most immediate development needs for CHIMERA, a massively parallel multi-physics code designed expressly to simulate core-collapse supernovae. These stellar explosions produce most of the elements in the Universe; are prodigious sources of neutrinos, gravitational waves, and photons, and lead to the formation of neutron stars and black holes. The extension of CHIMERA to petascale platforms will proceed through: 1) a complete, tested, three-dimensional spatial domain decomposition for the hydrodynamics, including a strategy to handle coordinate singularities in spherical polar coordinates; 2) a scalable three-dimensional Poisson solver for the gravitational field, both Newtonian and general relativistic; 3) a flexible, modular system for parallel I/O; 4) multi-core solutions for the linear systems dominating the thermonuclear kinetics and neutrino transport; 5) investigating Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages to overlap computation and communication; and 6) improvements to the physical models and algorithms.
Students and postdocs trained under this project will be well versed in virtually every important aspect of computational science, including numerical linear algebra, computational fluid dynamics, radiation transport, and stiff system solution, and will gain real world experience with the management, analysis, and visualization of large data sets, and the attendant hardware and software environments of petascale computing. The generalized methods will be applicable in other fields, and the popular allure of astrophysics makes it especially effective in public outreach for supercomputing. The team expects to continue with tours, talks, and presentations on computational astrophysics, reaching each year over 400 K-12 students and teachers, more than 200 college undergraduates, and hundreds of other non-scientists.
