Type Ia Supernovae

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This award facilitates scientific research using the large new computational resource named Blue Waters being developed by IBM and scheduled to be deployed at the University of Illinois. It provides travel funds to support technical coordination between the principal investigators, the Blue Waters project team and vendor technical team.The current standard model for Type Ia supernovae is the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf near the Chandrasekhar mass. Despite 50 years of study and a good qualitative understanding of the relevant physics, a quantitative model for these explosions that the community can agree upon is lacking. On Blue Waters, the problem will be solved using three new, highly scalable codes. White dwarf ignition will be followed using the low Mach number code, MAESTRO; turbulent nuclear burning will be simulated using the compressible AMR code, CASTRO; and radiation transport will be followed using the 3D implicit Monte Carlo code, SEDONA. All three codes have been proven to scale on at least tens of thousands of processors.Major resources, both computational and observational, are being invested by the US and Europe in attempts to discover and understand Type Ia supernovae. Part of the reason is their application to the dark energy problem in cosmology. These supernovae are also a laboratory for studying combustion in a situation where long time scales and large length scales allow phenomena to develop that are not terrestrially observable. Each of the three codes being developed to study supernovae has potential application outside of astrophysics, e.g., in combustion science and inertial fusion. The project will also help to train the next generation of computational physicists.