The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science has allocated 60% of the available time on the leadership-class supercomputers at DOE’s Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories to 81 computational science projects for 2025, including a project led by Drummond Fielding, assistant professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences.
A two-dimensional slice through the three-dimensional simulations Fielding and his collaborators are running on Frontier. The color shows the magnitude of the electric current, or curl of the magnetic field, which is a measure of how much the magnetic field “swirls.”
Fielding’s project, “Pushing the Frontier of Cosmic Ray Transport in Interstellar Turbulence,” will be funded through DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. His team has been allocated 600,00 “node-hours” on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s 2 exaflops peak Frontier, an HPE Cray EX supercomputer that debuted in May 2022 as the world’s fastest supercomputer. Each node has four GPUs, each with 220 cores (processing units), an impressive amount of computing power.
“We are going to run the largest simulations of the magnetized gas that pervades the space between stars, with the aim of understanding a crucial missing piece in our models for how stars and galaxies form,” Fielding said.
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