ASC / Alliances Center
for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes

Overview

The FLASH code is a modular, adaptive, parallel simulation code capable of handling general compressible flow problems in astrophysical environments. It is modular: FLASH has been designed to allow users to configure initial and boundary conditions, change algorithms, and add new physical effects with minimal effort. It is adaptive: FLASH uses the PARAMESH library to manage a block-structured adaptive grid, placing resolution elements only where they are needed most. It is parallel: FLASH uses the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) library to achieve portability and scalability on a variety of different message-passing parallel computers.

The Flash Code Group is part of the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes, or Flash Center, which was founded at the University of Chicago in 1997 under contract to the United States Department of Energy as part of its Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), now known as Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC). The goal of the Center is to solve several problems related to thermonuclear flashes on the surfaces of compact stars (neutron stars and white dwarfs), in particular X-ray bursts, Type Ia supernovae, and novae. To solve these problems requires the participants in the Center to develop new simulation tools capable of handling the extreme resolution and physical requirements imposed by conditions in these explosions, and to do so while making efficient use of the parallel supercomputers developed by the (ASC) project, the most powerful constructed to date. The FLASH code represents an important step along the road to this goal.

The Flash Code Group focuses on building and maintaining the code that carries out the Center's core astrophysics calculations. Its members include astrophysicists and computer scientists at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.

The Flash Code was awarded the 2000 Gordon Bell Award in the Special Category for achieving 0.25 TFLOPS on 6420 processors of (ASC) Red. Read the press release or the Gordon Bell paper.

Group Leader: Anshu Dubey

Group Members:

Peter Brune

Anshu Dubey

Lynn Reid

Paul Rich

Dan Sheeler

Klaus Weide