HPCwire: Scientists Compute Death Throes of White Dwarf Star

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March 23, 2007

Scientists Compute Death Throes of White Dwarf Star

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By carrying out "extreme computing" at two U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers, University of Chicago scientists have achieved a breakthrough in modeling an exploding white dwarf star. The researchers demonstrated how to incinerate such a star in unprecedented detail at the "Paths to Exploding Stars" conference on Thursday, March 22, in Santa Barbara, Calif.

White dwarf stars pack one and a half times the mass of the sun into an object the size of Earth. When they burn out, the ensuing explosion produces a type of supernova that astrophysicists believe manufactures most of the iron in the universe. But these type Ia supernovas, as they are called, may also help illuminate the mystery of dark energy, an unknown force that dominates the universe.

"That will only be possible if we can gain a much better understanding of the way in which these stars explode," said Don Lamb, Director of the University of Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes.

Scientists for years have attempted to blow up a white dwarf star by writing the laws of physics into computer software and then testing it in simulations. At first the detonations would only occur if inserted manually into the programs. Then the Flash Center team naturally detonated white dwarf stars in simplified, two-dimensional tests, but "there were claims made that it wouldn't work in 3D," Lamb said.

But in January, the Flash Center team for the first time naturally detonated a white dwarf in a more realistic three-dimensional simulation.

The detonation plays out in no more than three seconds, but simulation work takes considerably longer. The Flash Center team ran its massive simulation on two powerful supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Just one of the jobs ran for 75 hours on 768 computer processors, for a total of 58,000 hours.

"I cannot say enough about the support we received from the high-performance computing teams at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories," Lamb said. "Without their help, we would never have been able to do the simulations."

Katie Antypas, an HPC consultant in NERSC's User Services Group, worked closely with Lamb to run the simulations. "With help and input from many people at NERSC, from setting up accounts, allocating tera-bytes of disk space, granting file sharing permissions to analyzing output from failed runs, we were able to get the Flash team's 512-processor job up and running on short notice to help them meet a hard deadline," Antypas said.

The simulations are so demanding--the Flash Center team calls it "extreme computing"--that they monopolize the powerful computers during the allocated time. To ensure that these computers are used to their maximum potential, the Flash team stands on alert to rapidly correct any glitches that may arise.

"We have it set up so that if something goes wrong, text messages are sent out instantaneously to everyone," said Flash Center Research Scientist Robert Fisher. "It's like being a doctor on call 24/7."

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