The Indiana University Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) has been awarded $1.9 million to lead the computer science team of a new collaborative research project in the development of the execution model, software and programming methods for scientists using computer simulations to study how shockwaves travel through reactive materials.
Acting as a subcontractor for the University of Notre Dame, who received the funding from the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), CREST will also be collaborating with Purdue University, whose experimental physicists will test the accuracy of the computer simulation models. Notre Dame’s Center for Shock Wave-processing of Advanced Reactive Materials has been named a NNSA Single-Discipline Center, which comes with $1.6 million funding a year for five years under the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program II (PSAAP II).
‘This project is exciting on many levels,’ said Andrew Lumsdaine, CREST director, professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing (SOIC), and principal investigator and overall computer science lead for the IU award. ‘It’s a rare opportunity to close the loop between creating mathematical models and computations to predict scientific phenomenon, and discovering just how accurate these predictions are in real-world situations. It’s also a substantial collaborative research project involving the three leading research institutions in Indiana.’
Thomas Sterling, CREST associate director and chief scientist, and professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing, added: ‘We are eager to work with researchers to produce simulations that further scientific understanding of shockwave physics through reactive materials. This award is the single most important application challenge we have faced, and it really resonates with the class of computation we're doing.’