New Capabilities for the Enzo Community Code in the Petascale Era

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AST-0808184NormanEnzo is a three-dimensional parallel adaptive mesh refinement hybrid (fluid plus particle) open-source community code for astrophysical and cosmological simulations developed at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics (LCA) at the University of California-San Diego. Enzo underpins the research of many astronomers in areas as diverse as primordial star formation, galaxy formation, the intergalactic medium, galaxy clusters, interstellar turbulence, and Galactic star formation. The arrival of petascale computing platforms will take these and other researches into a new realm of physical realism, but not without appropriate parallel application software, whose development requires effort by an interdisciplinary team of domain scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists, such as has been assembled at the LCA. The present project will add radiation magnetohydrodynamics capabilities to Enzo within a new parallel framework designed for petascale platforms, and will include three annual software releases and two user workshops. These capabilities will enable larger-scale and higher dynamic range simulations in cosmological structure formation, interstellar turbulence, and star formation, as well as open up new possibilities wherever complex physics and high spatial dynamic range are needed.In addition to direct research impacts, this work will serve as a springboard for inter-departmental collaborations, bringing together graduate students from mathematics, physics and computer science into a coordinated program. The community-code nature of Enzo, distributed under UCSD policies for wide access under copyright, and with the user-friendly packaging and support which are part of this project, will enable a wide range of multiscale applications throughout astrophysics and other disciplines to harness petascale computing.