Research Projects

High-Energy Density Physics: The objective of the HEDP initiative is to add capabilities to the FLASH code to make it a highly capable toolset for the academic HEDP community. The initiative is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Program in the National Nuclear Security Administration and the (DOE) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research in the Office of Science.

Thermonuclear-Powered Supernovae: Type Ia (thermonuclear-powered) supernovae are among the brightest explosions in the universe. Observations using them as "cosmic yardsticks" led to the discovery of dark energy. The goal of the Flash Center's Type Ia supernova project is to understand these explosions better, and by doing so, help observers use them to determine the properties of dark energy. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Fluid-Structure Interaction: The object of this project is to develop petascale tools applicable to multi-body, fluid-structure interactions in laminar and turbulent flows. In particular the project will target applications in dense suspensions of deformable particles, such as whole-blood simulations from first principles. It is an NSF-funded collaborative project involving a multidisciplinary team from the University of Maryland and the University of Chicago with expertise in computational mechanics, multiscale modeling and parallel computing.

Implicit Solvers: The aim of this NSF-funded project is to implement a fully implicit solver in FLASH for stiff hyperbolic and parabolic systems. Such "stiff" systems arise in many nonlinear physics involving wide ranges of both length and time scales that are challenging to simulate.