The DOE Office of Science has announced awards of nearly 1.7 billion supercomputing hours via the INCITE program to 60 high-impact research projects which will address scientific and engineering challenges of national and global importance. CCSE and collaborators earned 86 million of those hours.

The first award, titled "Simulation of Turbulent Lean Hydrogen Flames in High Pressure", with PI John Bell and Co-I Marc Day, was for 40 million hours. The second award, titled "Petascale Simulations of Type Ia Supernovae," with PI Stan Woosley of UCSC and Co-I's John Bell, Mike Zingale of Stony Brook University, and Dan Kasen of UC Berkeley, was for 46 million hours. The average allocation was 28 million hours. Click here for a link to the Fact Sheets on all 60 awards.

John Bell gave the applied math seminar at UC Berkeley on November 9, discussing recent work on finite volume methods for fluctuating hydrodynamics. Part of abstract follows:

"At small scales, the Navier-Stokes equations traditionally used for modeling fluid flow break down and thermal fluctuations play an important role in the dynamics. Landau and Lifshitz proposed a modified version of the Navier-Stokes equations, referred to as the fluctuating Navier-Stokes equations (FNS), that adds stochastic flux terms designed to incorporate the effect of fluctuations. These stochastic fluxes are constructed so that the FNS equations are consistent with equilibrium fluctuations from statistical mechanics. Here we describe the development and analysis of finite-volume methods for PDEs with stochastic flux terms...."

A recent Nyx simulation of the evolution of the expanding universe will be featured as a live demonstration in the SC11 Exhibit Hall in Seattle, Washington, November 12-16. The simulation was performed on 4K cores on the hopper machine at NERSC. The demonstration, titled Visualizing the Universe at 100 Gbps, will take place in the Berkeley Lab Booth.

Additional simulations using CCSE codes area also featured in the Berkeley Lab Booth include Buoyant Burning Bubbles in Type Ia Supernovae, Turbulent Jets with Off-Source Heating (IAMR), and A New Perspective on Supernova Explosions. (CASTRO). More information about the LBL Demonstrations at SC11 can be found here.

David Brown, the head of the Computational Research Division (CRD), recently announced the formation of three new departments within CRD.

John Bell will head the new Mathematics and Computational Science Department, which consists of the Mathematics Group, CCSE, and the Computational Cosmology Center (C3).

The new Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing Group will be led by Esmond Ng, and is composed of the Scientific Computing Group, the Complex Systems Group, and the Applied Numerical Algorithms Group.

Finally, John Shalf will head the new Computer and Data Sciences Department, that encompasses the Visualization, Scientific Data Management, Future Technologies and Advanced Technologies Groups.

See the full announcement here.

``Fire is one of humankind's first technologies. We have been staring into the proverbial campfire for thousands of years. Yet, surprisingly there seems to be much more to learn. And now it's becoming even more important to our collective future that we know as much as we can about fire... ''

`` Robert Cheng, John Bell and the other team members have come together from different scientific disciplines; from mechanical engineering and mathematics to physics and chemistry, to develop these innovative burners and amazing three-dimensional combustion simulations that take advantage of some of the largest super computers in the world. The results are incredibly beautiful and mesmerizing models that one can get lost in staring at...''

This is the opening of the TV segment on KQED's QUEST Science show, which will air 7:30pm PST on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011. The clip of Robert Cheng of EETD and John Bell, head of CCSE, is featured here.

CCSE Postdoc Kaushik Balakrishnan, gave two presentations at this year's ICDERS Meeting, held at the Univeristy of California, Irvine, July 24-29. This meeting is the 23rd International Colloquium on the Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems (ICDERS)

The first presentation, titled Ignition of Aluminum Particle Clouds Behind Reflected Shock Waves, was co-authored by Balakrishnan, Allen Kuhl of LLNL, John Bell. and Vince Beckner. His second presentation, similarly authored, was titled An Empirical Model for the Ignition of Aluminum Particle Clouds Behind Blast Waves. A third paper, authored by Kuhl, Bell, Beckner and Balakrishnan, was presented by Allen Kuhl.

One of the highlighted speakers at this year's ICIAM conference, held in Vancouver, was John Bell. Bell spoke on Wednesday, July 20 about his joint work with collaborators Andy Nonaka and Ann Almgren of CCSE, and Mike Zingale of Stony Brook University, on Low Mach Number Models in Computational Astrophysics.

CSGF Fellows Leslie Dewan, Chris Eldred, and Thomas Fai will be presenting their work at the 2011 DOE CSGF Annual Conference held July 21-23 in Washington, D.C. Chris' poster will discuss the WRF model configuration for seasonal climate forecasting over the Bolivian altiplano; Thomas will present his work on An FFT-based immersed boundary method for variable viscosity and density fluids, and Leslie's poster will cover her work on Quantifying radiation damage to the network structure of radioactive waste-bearing materials.

DOE's Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program requires that its fellows spend at least one summer at a national laboratory during their fellowship period. Three CSGF fellows have joined CCSE for summer 2011.

Leslie Dewan is a student at MIT studying Nuclear Waste Management. She will work with CCSE on numerical simulation of porous media.

Chris Eldred is a student at the University of Utah studying Climate Modeling. He will work with CCSE on stochastic modeling.

Finally, Thomas Fai is a student at New York University studying Applied Mathematics. He will work with CCSE on fluctuating hydrodynamics.

The prepublication of a National Academy study titled Transforming Combustion Research Through Cyberinfrastructure is now available here. CCSE's John Bell is one of the co-authors of this report.

John Bell and Vince Beckner were both contributors to a book chapter in the recently released, Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications, the ninth in the Computational Science Series from CRC Press, with editors David Bailey, Robert Lucas and Samuel Williams.

A book chapter by John Bell and Marc Day, titled "Adaptive Methods for Simulation of Turbulent Combustion," has recently appeared in the new book, Turbulent Combustion Modeling: Advances, New Trends and Perspectives , part of the Springer Series on Fluid Mechanics and Its Applications, with editors Echekki and Epaminondas.