SC06 - Schedule - Event Detail

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SCHEDULE: NOV 11-17, 2006

The Cosmic Simulator

Session: Astrophysics

Event Type: Masterwork

Time: 10:30am - 11:15am

Speaker(s): Michael L. Norman

Location: Ballroom A

Abstract:
In the coming decade, the visible universe will be surveyed to unprecedented breadth, depth, and spectral coverage to explore its structures, past history, and future fate. Data volumes of many petabytes are expected. Numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation and evolution must keep pace in scale and complexity if they are to assist in the interpretation of such data, as well as to make predictions. We describe the Cosmic Simulator, a software facility under development at UCSD for performing, analyzing, and archiving cosmological simulations of unprecedented scale and physical realism. Its major components are the adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamic cosmology simulation code ENZO, a data analysis pipeline, and a Storage Resource Broker (SRB)-managed data archive housed at SDSC. We show scientific results from the Cosmic Simulator implemented on a data grid connecting LLNL and SDSC computational resources, and discuss future plans.

Chair/ Speaker Details:

Michael L. Norman
University of California, San Diego
Michael L. Norman is professor of physics at UCSD where he directs the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics. He received his B.S. from Caltech in 1975, and his Ph. D. from UC Davis in 1980. After holding appointments at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, he joined the faculty at UCSD in 2000. His research focus is the computer simulation of astronomical phenomena using supercomputers. He is the author of over 200 papers on diverse topics including star formation, cosmic jets, and galaxy formation. His computer visualizations have appeared in numerous educational TV shows and films, including PBS Nova and The Discovery Channel. He is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.