Thermonuclear-Powered Supernovae: Thermonuclear-powered (Type Ia) supernovae are among the most powerful explosions in the universe. They are the source of many of the chemical elements that make up planets and life on Earth. These events are also among the most accurate “cosmic yardsticks.” Observations using them revealed that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating and led to the discovery of dark energy. Recent observations and extraordinary large-scale computer simulations have provided new insights into the nature of these explosions. The goal of the Flash Center's Type Ia supernova project is to understand these explosions better, and by doing so, help observers use them to determine the properties of dark energy. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Fluid-Structure Interaction: The object of this project was to develop petascale tools applicable to multi-body, fluid-structure interactions in laminar and turbulent flows. In particular the project targeted applications in dense suspensions of deformable particles, such as whole-blood simulations from first principles. It was an NSF-funded collaborative project involving a multidisciplinary team from the University of Maryland and the University of Chicago with expertise in computational mechanics, multiscale modeling and parallel computing.

Implicit Solvers: The aim of this NSF-funded project was to implement a fully implicit solver in FLASH for stiff hyperbolic and parabolic systems. Such "stiff" systems arise in many nonlinear physics involving wide ranges of both length and time scales that are challenging to simulate.