Blondin Research Group - Research Page

Research

Our research utilizes the VH-1 gas dynamics code to simulate astrophysical flows. We make extensive use of large, parallel supercomputers, including Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Pleiades at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, and Summit at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. (Note the SASI image on the right-end cabinets of Titan at ORNL.)

Much of the research in our group is driven by undergraduate students. In the summer this activity is supported by an NSF REU program, Undergraduate Research in Computational Astrophysics.

Undergraduate Research

CDSA

2012 inaugural urca class

Student research activity ramps up each summer, with 6-8 astrophysics students participating in a 10-week program that includes training in programming, computational methods, hydrodynamics and astrophysics. Beginning in the summer of 2012, this undergraduate research program has been funded by the NSF REU program. Our program is called the Undergraduate Research in Computational Astrophysics, or URCA.

Beginning in the summer of 2022, new NSF funding has been provided to re-institute our summer program, now called Computational and Data Science in Astrophysics.

Computational Gas Dynamics

VH-1

shocked ejecta in a young snr

VH-1 is a multidimensional ideal compressible gas-dynamics code written in FORTRAN, with parallel versions available using MPI. It is based on the Lagrange-remap variant of the Piece-wise Parabolic Method (PPM) developed by Paul Woodward and Phil Colella. This code was originally made available to the public in 1990, and has gone through minor changes over the years (e.g., moving to F90).