Dr Tulin Kaman, who received her Ph.D. with Dr James Glimm at Stony Brook University, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Scherrer Institut and ETH-Zurich, recently visited CCSE for three weeks to continue her work on adding the BoxLib AMR capability to the OPAL code for particle accelerator simulations. OPAL is a tool for charged-particle optics calculations in large accelerator structures and beam lines. By adding BoxLib's AMR capability to OPAL, Dr. Kaman will be able to solve for the internal electric and magnetic field on an adaptive hierarchy of successively finer meshes embedded in the irregular particle accelerator geometry, and subcycle in time to further optimize the computation.

Leslie Dewan, a former DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) Fellow who spent the summer of 2011 working in CCSE, has just been named to Time Magazine's list of "30 People Under 30 Changing the World". According to the website, "Leslie Dewan's planned Waste-Annihilating Molten-Salt Reactor ... could have a major impacton the energy sector." See the Time profile here.

The lead article in this week's online Diexis Magazine, which describes Computational Science at the National Laboratories, is titled "Rewinding the Universe," and features a cosmological simulation performed using the BoxLib-based Nyx code. The simulation was perfored by Zarija Lukic of CRD and graduate student Casey Stark of UC Berkeley. See the full article here

Ann Almgren gave an invited presentation entitled BoxLib: A Software Framework for Block-Structured AMR Applications at the 42nd SPEEDUP Workshop on High-Performance Computing Workshop held at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in Villagen, Switzerland, on August 29-30, 2013. The focus of the workshop this year was Adaptive Mesh Refinement, and featured talks about AMR software and applications.

According to ResearchGate, the top downloaded publication in CRD this week was CASTRO: A New Compressible Astrophysical Solver. II. Gray Radiation Hydrodynamics, by Weiqun Zhang, Louis Howell of LLNL, Ann Almgren, Adam Burrows of Princeton University, and John Bell.

Second on the list was another CCSE paper titled An Adaptive Level Set Approach for Incompressible Two-Phase Flows.

And, according to ResearchGate, during the same week, Ann Almgren was CRD's "Top Member by Publication Downloads."

The JSC High-Q Club is a showcase for codes that can utilise the entire JUQUEEN supercomputer at JSC (458,752 cores).

Matt Emmett, along with collaborators Robert Speck, Daniel Ruprecht, and Mathias Bolten developed a parallel solver for time-dependent PDEs with stiff linear stiff terms. The code uses a parallel multigrid solver (PMG) for spatial solves of the implicit/stiff term, and the parallel full approximation scheme in space and time (PFASST) integration scheme to evolve the system through time. This combination of PMG+PFASST parallelizes the system in both the spatial and temporal directions. For a fixed size problem, the parallel speedup using only PMG saturates before the full core count is reached. Using PFASST in conjunction with PMG allows the same fixed size problem to scale to all cores on JUQUEEN.

Congratulations to CCSE summer student Jonathan Wang, whose poster on "A Comparison of the V-cycle and FMG-Cycle" won the "Most Original Poster" award at the Computing Sciences Summer Student (CSSS) poster session on Thursday, August 1. Working with Ann Almgren, as well as Mike Lijewski and Sam Williams, Jonathan has spent the summer investigating the computational efficiency of the multigrid V-cycle and FMG-cycle for a variety of coefficients, boundary conditions, resolutions, and problem types. Jonathan will be a senior at UC Berkeley this fall with a major in mechanical engineering.

About 50 students from the East Bay Consortium of Educational Institutions visited Berkeley Lab on July 26, 2013 to learn about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Deb Agarwal, who heads CRD's Advanced Computing for Sciences Department, welcomed the group and gave a brief overview of Berkeley Lab. Andy Nonaka (CRD) talked about his research in computational astrophysics; Ben Bowen (Life Sciences Division) talked about mass spectrometry and Susan Amrose(Environmental Energy Technology Division) talked about engineering for economic and social development. The visit culminated with a tour of the Advanced Light Source led by Christine Beavers, Bruce Rude, Thomas Scarvie and Doug Taube. CRD's Sarah Poon organized the visit. See the photos.

George Pau, a former Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow who worked in CCSE for three years and is now a research scientist in LBNL's Earth Sciences Division, has been honored with a 2013 Department of Energy Early Career award. His abstract, titled "A Multiscale Reduced-Order Method for Integrated Earth System Modeling," describes his proposed work to build a new kind of "reduced-order" climate model, made up of statistical approximations or "surrogates" for multi-scale processes that can be solved much more quickly than a full climate model. Congratulations, George!

Aleks Donev, former CCSE postdoctoral researcher, now assistant professor of mathematics at Courant Institute of Mathematical Scientists, recipient of a five-year DOE Early Career Research Award and CCSE collaborator, has recently been profiled in the DOE ASCR "new faces" series. The profile is titled "Of colorful candies and fluid dynamics," and describes Donev's career path and research interests. See the full article here.

Ann Almgren and Weiqun Zhang are co-authors of a paper to be presented at the American Physical Society April Meeting, April 13--16, in Denver, Colorado. The April Meeting gathers particle physicists, nuclear physicists, and astrophysicists to share new results and insights. The paper, titled "The Most Powerful Stellar Explosions," presents the results of 3D simulations of thermonuclear supernovae using CCSE's CASTRO code. Ke-Jung Chen of the University of Minnesota is the principal author, with contributions from Alexander Heger of Monash University and Stan Woosley of UC Santa Cruz.

As part of Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences' ongoing outreach efforts with the Kennedy High School IT Academy in Richmond, 11 students and two teachers spent half the day March 20 learning about different career opportunities in computing and networking. The event was organized to give the students ideas about career paths beyond the basics of computer science and web design taught in the classroom.

Andy Nonaka of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering talked about "Using Math to Blow Up Stars" in which he described how he uses his applied math skills to create detailed simulations of supernovae, as well as other complex phenomena

See the article here.

As they have for the past five years, Berkeley Lab staff members hosted Albany High School juniors as part of the school's annual Job Shadow Day. In all, six scientists played host/mentor this year. Andy Nonaka of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering volunteered as a host in CRD.

See the article here.

A new image from a recent Type Ia supernova post-ignition simulation using CCSE's CASTRO code is featured on the cover of NCSA's Access Magazine, available here. This particular simulation has been featured on back-to-back covers. The CASTRO simulation was performed by Chris Malone and Stan Woosley of UC Santa Cruz, and Andy Nonaka of CCSE, and used 24 Million CPU-hours from a Blue Waters Early Science System Award. This simulation ran on 64,000 cores and used 5 levels of AMR in order to realize an uprecedented ~100m resolution. Visualization courtesy of Robert Sisneros and Dave Semeraro of NCSA.

An article by Alexander Heger of Monash University in the February 7 edition of Nature featured a CASTRO simulation of a collision between two shells of matter ejected by a massive star in two subsequent pulsational pair-instability supernova eruptions, performed by Ke-Jung (Ken) Chen. See the full Nature article here.

Leslie Dewan, a former DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) Fellow who spent the summer of 2011 working in CCSE, has just been named to Forbes "30 Under 30: Energy" list. This list seeks to identify "the field's brightest stars under the age of 30." Dewan, currently a PhD student at MIT, is also the co-founder and CEO of Transatomic Power, a new company that seeks "turn nuclear waste into a safe, clean and scalable source of electricity." See the Forbes profile here.

David Ketcheson, an assistant professor and leader of the Numerical Mathematics Group at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), recently posted a blog entitled "Five reasons why you should submit your next paper to CAMCoS." In this blog, which starts, "I have a new favorite journal... " and goes on to say, "CAMCoS is a hidden gem ...", Ketcheson gives his top five reasons to publish in Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, an online journal of which John Bell is a co-founder and managing editor. See the blog post here.

John Bell is a co-PI on a recently announced 2013 INCITE award for a project called "Petascale Simulations of Type Ia Supernovae". Prof. Stan Woosley of UC Santa Cruz is the PI on this award that received 55M hours on Titan. The simulations of Type Ia supernovae will be performed using CASTRO, a compressible radiation-hydrodynamics code developed by CCSE.