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Alumni ProjectShedding New Light on Exploding Stars: TeraScale Simulations of Neutrino Driven Supernovae and Their Nucleosynthesis (The TeraScale Supernova Initiative) — OverviewProject PI: Anthony Mezzacappa (ORNL) Collaborators Principal Goals/Needs The TeraScale Supernova Initiative is a national, multi-institution, interdisciplinary collaboration of astrophysicists, nuclear physicists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists. TSI proper involves 42 researchers from 11 institutions and, together with its collaborators, 121 researchers from 24 institutions worldwide. The principal goals of the project are (a) to understand the mechanism(s) responsible for the explosions of massive stars (stars more massive than ten of our Suns), also known as core collapse supernovae, (b) to understand all of the phenomena associated with these stellar explosions, such as their contribution to the synthesis of the chemical elements in the Periodic Table, their emission of an unfathomable flux of nearly massless, radiation-like particles known as neutrinos, their emission of gravitational waves (ripples in space predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity), and in some cases their emission of intense bursts of gamma radiation, (c) to provide the theoretical foundations supporting the scientific mission of the Office of Science's existing and proposed premier experimental facilities, such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA), and the National Underground Science Laboratory (NUSL), whose scientific missions are in no small part defined by supernova science, (d) to develop the methods to simulate three-dimensional, multiangle, multifrequency, precision radiation transport on TeraScale computers, (e) to develop the theory and methods to predict using TeraScale computers the physical states of the complex nuclei found in stars that participate in supernova explosions, (f) to serve as a proto-type interdisciplinary collaboration in computational astrophysics, (g) to serve as a testbed for the integration of all technologies needed in a simulation pipeline (data management, networking, data analysis, and visualization), and (h) to serve as a testbed for software engineering in the computational sciences. Explosions of massive stars are arguably the most important link in our chain of origins from the Big Bang to the formation and evolution of life on Earth. They are the dominant source of most elements in the Periodic Table between oxygen and iron, and are believed to be responsible for producing half of all elements heavier than iron. These explosions also serve as Cosmic laboratories for physics at extremes that are inaccessible in Terrestrial experiment. The wealth of new observations in conjunction with realistic three-dimensional models will make the latter possible. As their name suggests, core collapse supernovae result from stellar core collapse and the formation of a shock wave that is ultimately responsible for the explosion. They are radiation-driven, turbulent events. The intense radiation of neutrinos from the stellar core is believed to power them, and neutrino production, transport, and interaction in the core defines the dynamics of core collapse. Three-dimensional radiation transport is arguably the single most important component of a supernova model. TeraScale supernova simulations require a TeraScale applied mathematics and computer science infrastructure. Our needs include (a) solvers for algebraic equations at the heart of the solution of the equations governing supernova physics, (b) software engineering to enable the software integration required by supernova simulations, (c) code performance monitoring to make optimal use of TeraScale platforms, (d) management and analysis of TeraBytes of simulation data, (e) development of data representations and rendering techniques to visualize and, consequently, understand simulation data, and (f) developments in networking to enable collaborative research by a nationally distributed scientific team.
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