TRIUMF researcher Dr. Petr Navratil, along with a team of seven other international researchers, have been awarded a prestigious supercomputing award through the US Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) Program. Their joint proposal, titled Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Reactions, was awarded a total of 204 million processor hours from the TITAN and MIRA computing facilities at Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories (in Tennessee and Illinois, respectively). Other proposals averaged 75 million processor hours awarded, and included topics such as seismology, aircraft engine design and simulations for the advancement of particle accelerators at CERN and Fermilab.
“The INCITE program—which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary—provides researchers with the opportunity to make scientific breakthroughs in fields that would not be probable or even possible without access to the most powerful available supercomputers,” said James Hack, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, which houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF).
The award to Petr and his co-investigators will allow state-of-the-art calculations to be made that will help to explain the structures and interactions of rare isotopes which are otherwise difficult to study through experimentation due to their short lifetimes, or for which regular computational power is not efficient. The TITAN and MIRA computers available through INCITE are currently considered among the fastest computers in the world. These studies are important for understanding reactions that lie at the core of our understanding of the formation of our universe, and also have applications in nuclear energy and security.
To qualify for the award, the 30-member research team led by Dr. James Vary of Iowa State University and six co-investigators, including Petr, had to develop and demonstrate that the computer code they use to develop their research could appropriately scale to use the INCITE supercomputers in the most efficient manner possible. Though the team has previously received about 140 million computing hours from this same program, the application to this year’s award was more competitive than ever, with only one-third of applicants being successful.
In collaboration with researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Petr will access a portion of the computing time for his research that seeks to simultaneously describe the bound states and resonances of light nuclei as well as their reactions. Other researchers will study other aspects of nuclear structure and reactions such a microscopic description of nuclear fission and investigations of neutrino properties and supernova explosions. The joint research goals can only be achieved using advanced computer calculations made possible through supercomputers. Through this increased computational ability, Petr and his colleagues hope to further test and understand the nuclear forces and nuclei from their most fundamental principles and basic interactions, in particular three-nucleon interactions.
Petr's team, including TRIUMF's post-doctoral researcher Carolina Romero-Redondo, recently published a paper regarding these ab initio theories for which they had used calculations from the team’s prior INCITE award. The team showed how to introduce three-cluster dynamics within these ab initio theories in order to describe systems with this configuration and presented results for the bound state and resonances of Helium-6 nuclei. Carolina presented a poster on the subject during TRIUMF's International Peer Review last week.
The INCITE award was also used to calculate the scattering of Carbon-10 nuclei on protons with the goal to shed the light on the resonances of the exotic nucleus Nitrogen-11 and, in particular, to make a direct comparison to an experimental measurement of the Carbon-10 scattering on protons conducted by Saint Mary's University Professor Dr. Ritu Kanungo at TRIUMF. Such a comparison tests our knowledge of nuclear forces, including the three-nucleon interaction.
Petr and his team are optimistic that their research will be greatly aided by the latest INCITE award, and hope to be able to be part of the answer to some of the most fundamental questions in nuclear physics research.
Congratulations!
-Ariane
Madden, Communications Assistant
(with information from the DOE INCITE press
release
and Drs. Petr Navratil and James Vary)