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NERSC Initiative for Scientific Exploration (NISE) 2011 Awards

Large High-Resolution Galaxy Simulation Program

Joel Primack, University of California - Santa Cruz

Associated NERSC Project: Galaxy Formation Simulations (mp363)

NISE Award: 1,500,000 Hours
Award Date: June 2011

A combination of observations with Hubble Space Telescope and simulations on NERSC's largest system Hopper-II will allow us to resolve many mysteries of galaxy formation. One of the key issues is the formation of bulges of spiral galaxies and the formation of elliptical galaxies. Current theory (mostly hydro simulations) has two competing scenarios. Bulges can be formed either in large mergers of galaxies or through violent instabilities developing in disk galaxies in the early Universe. With few high-quality simulations available so far (about a dozen per year by different groups) it is difficult to interpret observations and resolve this critial issue. The situation will be different once we simulate hundreds of galaxies with different masses, merging histories, and environments.

The Cosmic Assembly Near-IR Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) is a very large (over 900 orbits) new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observational program to study the the first third of galactic evolution from redshift $z = 8$ to 1.5 (0.6 to 4.5 billion years after the Big Bang) via deep imaging of more than 250,000 galaxies exploiting the new WFC3 camera on HST. Five premier multi-wavelength sky regions are targeted; each has multi-wavelength data and also extensive spectroscopy of the brighter galaxies. We are participants in CANDELS, and this NISE proposal intends to complement these new observations with a large suite of hydro plus N-body cosmological simulations of galaxies that include the numerous physical processes involved: hydrodynamics, radiative atomic and molecular cooling, stellar feedback, metal enrichment, radiation pressure, and the fueling of and feedback from supermassive black holes. Development of this simulation program was started on the NERSC Bassi system, as described and illustrated in the article ``Baby Brutes'' in the NERSC Annual Report 2008-2009, pp. 64-68. We have continued developing our codes on the NASA Ames Schirra and Pleiades systems. Several improvements have now been added, and the simulations are now even more realistic.

The many 24-core nodes on Hopper-II will allow us to do mass production of extremely high-resolution galaxy simulations, which was unthinkable even a few years ago. We propose to simulate a statistical sample of 300 galaxies, a factor of 20 more than we have at present. This will be by far the best set of cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. With hundreds of galaxies simulated we can also explore numerous issues that were difficult to address before, such as the effects of environment, the frequency and duration of major mergers, and the formation of spiral galaxy bulges and of elliptical galaxies. We now have tools -- including our premier radiative transfer code SUNRISE -- to produce the same quantities that we get from observations: realistic images in many wavebands including the effects of dust, spectral energy distributions, stellar masses and ages, and kinematics. This allows a direct comparison of the numerical simulations with astronomical observations.

Table of Contents

  1. Overview
  2. New potential energy surface for ozone molecule
  3. Hybrid OpenMP/MPI approach to R-matrix scattering
  4. Global Effects on the Dynamics of Plasmoids and Flux Ropes During Magnetic Reconnection
  5. MD Simulations of Liquid Water Films at the Boundary Between Gas Hydrate and Mineral Surfaces
  6. Systems Biology Knowledge Base
  7. Sparse Lanczos and GMRES Solvers in Co-Array Fortran (CAF)
  8. Numerical Study of Mode Conversion and Ion Heating in Laboratory-Relevant Plasmas
  9. Large Scale Numerical Study of Bootstrap Current in Edge Pedestal Plasma
  10. Ab initio simulation of mechanical properties of bulk metallic glass and Mo-bases alloys
  11. Improving Algorithms and Resolution for the Ocean-Atmosphere Reanalysis for Climate Applications OARCA (1850-2012)
  12. High resolution modeling to identify the location of the meltwater flood responsible for the Younger Dryas cold episode
  13. Numerical Investigations of Symmetry Breaking, Magnetism and the Pseudogap in the Three-Orbital Hubbard Model
  14. Breaking Magnetic Field Lines with Turbulence
  15. Development of CALPHAD type approach to thermal conductivity aided by first-principles phonon approach
  16. An Efficient Real-Space Approach to Calculating Auger Spectra
  17. Surface Instabilities and Subgrid Scale Models in Computational Fluid Dynamics
  18. Self-Healing of Polymer Films
  19. Computational Studies of Methanol Steam Reforming
  20. Laser Acceleration of Ions Using Few Times Critical Density Gas Targets
  21. An Integrative Strategy to Model Complex Biological Assemblies
  22. Unveiling Microbial Carbon Cycling Processes in Key U.S. Soils using "omics"
  23. Semiclassical Approaches for Clean Energy Resources
  24. Tall Tower Wind Energy Monitoring and Numerical Model Validation in Southern Nevada
  25. Threading EnergyPlus Using OpenMP
  26. First-Principles Calculation of Phonon-Assisted Optical Absorption in Indirect-Band-Gap Semiconductors.
  27. Deep Defect States and Valence Skipping in Narrow Band Gap Semiconductors
  28. Material Simulations in Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP)
  29. High Fidelity Study of Multiscale Multiphase Lubricant Flow in High-Speed Gear Systems
  30. Semiclassical Approaches for Clean Energy Resources
  31. First Principles Characterization of van der Waals Dispersion Interactions
  32. Simulating ETG Plasma Turbulence with Impurities
  33. Coupled Electronic and Nuclear Dynamics in Enzymes and Photocatalysts
  34. Proton-coupled electron transfer in photocatalysis and protein translocation in biosynthesis: Bridging lengthscales and timescales in molecular simulation
  35. Three Dimensional Models for Martensitic Phase Transformations
  36. Molecular Simulations of the Release of Phosphate and ADP from F1-ATPase to Aid in the Understanding of the Function of F1-ATPase
  37. Turbulence over Complex Terrain: A Wind Energy Perspective
  38. Performance Enhancements for Three-Dimensional Fast Fourier Transforms Library P3DFFT
  39. Accelerated Materials Design Towards the Materials Genome
  40. Triple Photoionization of the Li atom
  41. Implementation of C-MAD Parallel Code to Include New Physics and Capabilities for Future Particle Colliders
  42. Morphology of Young Core-Collapse Supernova Remnants from Multi-Physics Three-Dimensional Simulations
  43. Large High-Resolution Galaxy Simulation Program
  44. Towards High Performance Urban Canopy Flows
  45. Evaluating PGAS scientific graph analysis codes on the Gemini interconnect
  46. Representing Convective Clouds in Global Circulation Models
  47. Simulation of Inelastic Decoherence in Electronic Transport Through Nanoscale Structures
  48. Improving Scalability of an Eigensolver for the Kohn-Sham Electronic Structure Problem
  49. Phonon, thermodynamic and diffusion properties of lithium-ion batteries from first-principles calculations
  50. CACHE novel architecture research
  51. High performance simulation of reactive transport processes at the pore scale
  52. First-Principles Calculations of Multiferroic Oxides
  53. High resolution integration of CAM5 for extreme weather research
  54. Modeling and Simulation of High Dimensional Stochastic Multiscale PDE Systems at the Exascale
  55. Theoretical Investigation on the Properties of Energy Materials
Last edited: 2024-10-03 19:38:24
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