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Type Ia Supernova: Turbulent Combustion at the Grandest Scale (video clip 2.5MB) SciDAC 2010 VisNight Winner!	Left: Deep inside a dying star in a galaxy far, far away, a carbon fusion flame ignites. Ignition may happen in the middle or displaced slightly to one side, but this simulation explores the consequences of central ignition. In a localized hot spot, represented here by a deformed sphere with an average radius of 100 km, carbon is assumed to have already fused to iron, producing hot ash (~10 billion K) with a density about 20% less than its surroundings. As the burning progresses, this hot buoyant ash rises up and interacts with cold fuel. Rayleigh-Taylor fingers give rise to shear and turbulence, which interacts with the flame, causing it to move faster. In about 2 seconds, the energy released blows the entire white dwarf star up, leaving nothing behind but a rapidly expanding cloud of radioactive nickel, iron, and other heavy elements. A Type Ia supernova is born. Credits: produced by Hank Childs of VACET in conjunction with members of the Computation Astrophysics Consortium (CAC): Haitao Ma and Stan Woosley of UC Santa Cruz, and John Bell, Ann Almgren, and Andy Nonaka of LBL
Image created by VACET for Adam Burrows (Princeton), who is part of the SciDAC Computational Astrophysics Consortium, as part of our ongoing user support mission. This image shows a radial slice of a CASTRO calculation shown on the "globe display" at the LBNL booth at SC09.	Image created by VACET for Adam Burrows (Princeton), who is part of the SciDAC Computational Astrophysics Consortium, as part of our ongoing user support mission. This image was is from a movie of CASTRO simulation output for Dr. Burrow's team showing the variable entropy.	Image created by VACET for Adam Burrows (Princeton), who is part of the SciDAC Computational Astrophysics Consortium, as part of our ongoing user support mission. This image is from a movie of CASTRO simulation output for Dr. Burrow's team showing the variable Ye.	Image created by VACET for Adam Burrows (Princeton), who is part of the SciDAC Computational Astrophysics Consortium, as part of our ongoing user support mission. This image is from a movie of CASTRO simulation output for Dr. Burrow's team showing radial velocity.
Supernova Simulation The collapse of massive star's core results in the formation of an outgoing spherical shock wave that eventually disrupts the entire star, giving rise to a supernova. Along the way the shock temporarily stalls and experiences the "stationary accretion shock instability" (SASI), which causes large deviations from spherical symmetry. This appears to be important to the supernova explosion mechanism, and may be responsible for spinning up the collapsed core---a nascent neutron star---into a pulsar. This image shows an exploratory view of a simulation run to ascertain the extent to which the SASI may generate magnetic fields: a volume rendering shows the fluid speed, and a sampling of fluid streamlines is colored by magnetic field strength. The simulation was run on Jaguar at NCCS with GenASiS, a multi-physics code under development for the simulation of astrophysical systems involving nuclear matter. Visualization: Dave Pugmire (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). Simulation: Eirik Endeve, Christian Cardall, and Reuben Budiardja Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Video Clip (70MB) This project, led by by Fausto Cattaneo, University of Chicago, used a previous allotment of 2 million processor-hours to study the forces that help newly born stars and black holes increase in size. In space, gases and other matter often form swirling disks around attracting central objects such as newly formed stars. The presence of magnetic fields can cause the disks to become unstable and develop turbulence, thereby causing the disk material to fall onto the central object. This run at NERSC was used to set up initial conditions for a larger scale simulations. The Visualization Group assisted this project in generating High-quality visualizations of data produced in these runs. Based on these initial results, the project continues to carry out large-scale simulations to test theories on how turbulence can develop in such disks. Gunther H. Weber.
Visualization of Magneto-rotational instability and turbulent angular momentum transport.	Visualization of Magneto-rotational instability and turbulent angular momentum transport.	Video Clip (13.6MB) Visualization of Magneto-rotational instability and turbulent angular momentum transport.	The featured plot is a Volume plot of the logarithm of gas/dust density in an Enzo star and galaxy simulation. Regions of high density are white while less dense regions are more blue and also more transparent. The data used to make this image were provided by Tom Abel Ph.D. and Matthew Turk of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.
Visualizations of magnetically unstable cylindrical Couette flow. This image shows the enstrophy and regions of high hydrodynamic dissipation, and was created by Cristina Siegerist, LBNL, in a collaborative effort between VACET, the NERSC Analytics program (www.nersc.gov) Simulations by F. Cattaneo(1,2), P. Fischer(1) & A. Obabko(2) (1) Argonne National Laboratory (2) University of Chicago as part of DOE's INCITE program.	Visualizations of magnetically unstable cylindrical Couette flow. This image shows the enstrophy and regions of high hydrodynamic dissipation, and was created by Cristina Siegerist, LBNL, in a collaborative effort between VACET, the NERSC Analytics program (www.nersc.gov) Simulations by F. Cattaneo(1,2), P. Fischer(1) & A. Obabko(2) (1) Argonne National Laboratory (2) University of Chicago as part of DOE's INCITE program.