NASA grant to support free tool to improve astrophysical simulations
David Radice, associate professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics, has been selected to receive a Sustainment Award from NASA, which provides support for the sustainable development of tools that are freely available to everyone and critical for the goals of the NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The grant will provide nearly $920,000 over three years and will allow Radice and his colleagues to advance an open-source code called AthenaK for computational astrophysicists.
AthenaK is one of 15 projects to receive one of NASA’s Open-Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries awards, which are funded by NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer through the agency’s Research Opportunities for Space and Earth Science.
“These projects are integral to our missions, critical to our data infrastructure, underpin machine learning and data science tools, and are used by our researchers, every day, to advance science that protects our planet and broadens our understanding of the universe,” said Steve Crawford, program executive for open science implementation in the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer at NASA.
AthenaK is a freely accessible code that provides an infrastructure for astrophysical simulations, used, for example, to model the distribution of dark matter or what happens when cosmic objects collide. It is a redesign of a previous code, Athena++, and will ensure that simulations can be performed across a variety of computational technologies, including ultrapowerful “exascale” machines that can perform quintillions of computations each second.
“High-performance computing architecture is evolving rapidly,” Radice said. “The recent advances in computing power through exascale facilities provides a unique opportunity for theoretical astrophysicists to expand their simulations. But these new machines require a variety of programming architectures and models, and many theoretical astrophysicists lack the resources to adapt code. AthenaK is an open-source code that will operate across a variety of architectures.”
AthenaK is already being used for several applications on the DOE exascale machines at the Leadership Computing Facilities at the Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories. The new grant will allow the research team to advance the simulation capabilities of AthenaK.
To support its growing user community, the research team will also create documentation, examples, tutorials, and scripts for use of AthenaK on NASA’s high-performance computing machines. They will also host a summer school, which will pair new users with expert developers to help educate the next generation of computational astrophysicists. Details of the summer school will be announced in 2025.
In addition to Radice, the research team includes in Jim Stone, professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study; Drummond Fielding, assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University; Goni Halevi, assistant teaching professor at Illinois Tech; Eve Ostriker, the Lyman Spitzer, Jr., Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics and professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University; and Zhaohuan Zhu, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.