The Computational Challenge of Modeling the Explosion of Massive Stars
 
Dr. Anthony Mezzacappa

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

 
Core collapse supernovae are the death throes of stars more massive than ten Suns and are responsible for producing and disseminating many of the elements in the Periodic Table, without which life as we know it would not exist.  They are, therefore, a key link in our chain of origins from the Big Bang to the present day.  They are also among the most energetic events in the Universe, the birth place of neutron stars (and hence pulsars) and stellar mass black holes, and serve as cosmic laboratories for fundamental physics that may be inaccessible in terrestrial experiment.  The precise "recipe" for explosion remains elusive, despite four decades of research.  As we will see, this is not surprising given core collapse supernovae are multi-physics events that will require a systematic, multidimensional, computational study to advance our understanding of them.  We will discuss the key ingredients now believed to play a significant role in the supernova mechanism.  Supernova models require multi-neutrino-angle, multi-neutrino-frequency transport, rendering the problem truly multidimensional.  While current simulations are being performed at the TeraScale level, complete three-dimensional models will ultimately require PetaScale computing.  We will discuss past, ongoing, and planned simulations.  We will also discuss the developments in applied mathematics and computer science that have enabled the simulations performed thus far and will emphasize the computational science "infrastructure" that must be put in place to enable the proposed simulations that will take us to the PetaScale level.  This is one of Nature's Computational Grand Challenges.  It will take a concerted, interdisciplinary effort by astrophysicists, nuclear physicists, particle physicists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists to answer one of the most fundamental questions that could be asked: "How did we come to be in the Universe?"
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