FLASH is a professionally managed multi-physics multi-scale modular, and extensible code with a wide user base. FLASH was originally designed for handling reactive compressible flow problems in astrophysical environments. It has grown rapidly, and now has extensive capabilities for other research fields, including high-energy density physics and fluid-structure interactions. FLASH is modular and extensible: it has been designed to allow users to configure initial and boundary conditions, change algorithms, and add new physical effects with minimal effort. FLASH is adaptive: it uses the Chombo and PARAMESH libraries to manage a block-structured adaptive grid, placing resolution elements only where they are needed most. FLASH is parallel: it uses the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) library to achieve portability and scalability on a variety of different message-passing parallel computers. Efforts are underway to support hybrid MPI/thread or MPI/shared-memory programming in FLASH.
The Code Group focuses on developing and maintaining the code, and in supporting the user community. Its members include University of Rochester astrophysicists, physicists, engineers and computer scientists.
The FLASH
Code was awarded the 2000 Gordon Bell Award in the Special Category
for achieving 0.25 TFLOPS on 6420 processors of (ASC) Red.
Read the
press
release or the Gordon
Bell paper.