Preparing Nuclear Astrophysics for Exascale

Authors: Max Katz (NVIDIA Corporation); Ann Almgren (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory); Maria Barrios Sazo and Kiran Eiden (Stony Brook University); Kevin Gott (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory); Alice Harpole (Stony Brook University); Jean Sexton, Don Willcox, and Weiqun Zhang (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory); and Michael Zingale (Stony Brook University)

Abstract: Astrophysical explosions such as supernovae are fascinating events that require sophisticated algorithms and substantial computational power to model. Castro and MAESTROeX are nuclear astrophysics codes that simulate thermonuclear fusion in the context of supernovae and X-ray bursts. Examining these nuclear burning processes using high resolution simulations is critical for understanding how these astrophysical explosions occur. In this paper we describe the changes that have been made to these codes to transform them from standard MPI + OpenMP codes targeted at petascale CPU-based systems into a form compatible with the pre-exascale systems now online and the exascale systems coming soon. We then discuss the new science that is possible to model on systems such as Summit and Perlmutter, which could not have been achieved with the previous generation of supercomputers.




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