Blue Gene/P supercomputer to simulate extreme physics of exploding stars

A snapshot of a Type Ia supernova simulation taken very shortly after the moment of detonation. The energy released during the detonation is equivalent to 1,027 hydrogen bombs, each equivalent... Click here for more information.

Robert Fisher and Cal Jordan are among a team of scientists who will expend 22 million computational hours during the next year on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, simulating an event that takes less than five seconds.

Fisher and Jordan require such resources in their field of extreme science. Their work at the University of Chicago’s Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes explores how the laws of nature unfold in natural phenomena at unimaginably extreme temperatures and pressures. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory will serve as one of their primary tools for studying exploding stars.

“The Argonne Blue Gene/P supercomputer is one of the largest and fastest supercomputers in the world,” said Fisher, a Flash Center Research Scientist. “It has massive computational resources that are not available on smaller platforms elsewhere.”

Desktop computers typically contain only one or two processors; Blue Gene/P has more than 160,000 processors. What a desktop computer could accomplish in a thousand years, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer can perform in three days. “It’s a different scale of computation. It’s computation at the cutting edge of science,” Fisher said.

Access to Blue Gene/P, housed at the Argonne Advanced Leadership Computing Facility, was made possible by a time allocation from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program. The Flash Center was founded in 1997 with a grant from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing. The NNSA’s Academic Strategic Alliance Program has sustained the Flash Center with funding and computing resources throughout its history.