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The Flash Center for Computational Science's research has ranged from High-Energy Density Physics (HEDP) and Supernovae to Co-Design for Exascale. Currently, the Flash Center is leading a variety of astrophysically-motivated HEDP experiments at The University of Rochester's Omega laser facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The common thread running through our current and past projects is FLASH, a publicly available multiphysics multiscale simulation code with a wide international user base. Based at the University of Chicago, the Flash Center's current research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration and involves collaborations with Argonne National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The objective of the (HEDP) project is to develop the FLASH code into a highly capable simulation code for the academic High-Energy Density Physics (HEDP) community. Another goal is to ensure that FLASH continues to perform and scale well on the upcoming petascale platforms. These activities are jointly supported by ASCR/Office of Science/DOE, and ASC/National Nuclear Security Administration/DOE.

In addition to the HEDP activities described above, The Flash HEDP Exascale Co-Design Center, currently under a planning grant as a part of DOE's exascale initiative, is an integral part of our HEDP and computational activities. The objectives of the Flash HEDP Exascale Co-Design Center are to enable the modeling and simulation of HEDP experiments on exascale computers, allowing scientists to address physical regimes and phenomena currently infeasible in the laboratory. The emphasis is on predictive capability through higher model fidelity, not higher mesh resolution. Through a rigorously defined co-design structure and process, the Center intends to apply domain research to identify and tune interdependences among the platforms, applied mathematics and computer science.

Other recent projects include: Petascale Computing of Thermonuclear Supernova Explosions, funded by NSF, Petascale Algorithms for Multi-body Fluid-structure Interactions in Viscous Incompressible Flow, funded by the PetaApps Program in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and Developing an Implicit Solver on a Parallel Block-Structured Adaptive Mesh Grid for FLASH, funded by the Physics at the Information Frontier Program in the Division of Physics.