Two Argonne visualizations took prizes at the SciDAC 2010 Electronic Visualization Night on July 14-- “Verification Study of Buoyancy-Driven Turbulent Nuclear Combustion for Three Different Physical Situations” and “Binary Galaxy Cluster Merger, Simulated Using the Flash Code, Mass Ration 1:1, with an Offset Impact, 4 Different Views"--both of which used ALCF resources. 

Each year, scientists participating in the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC), along with other researchers from the computational science community gather at the annual SciDAC conference to present scientific results, discuss new technologies and discover new approaches to collaboration. SciDAC 2010 was held at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. SciDAC's Electronic Visualization Night provides an informal opportunity to researchers to present an image or animation of their recent work. This year, 32 entries were submitted, which were shown on several continuous loops throughout the conference building. Approximately 160 people attended, who then voted on the top ten winners.

Top prize went to "Verification Study of Buoyancy-Driven Turbulent Nuclear Combustion for Three Different Physical Situations," which presented the results of 3D verification simulations of buoyancy-driven turbulent combustion, a key physical process in Type 1a supernovae. The simulations were generated using the FLASH code on Argonne's IBM Blue Gene/P and were made possible by a DOE INCITE award, which allotted the Flash team 70 million processor-hours on Argonne’s Blue Gene/P this year to address key challenges in the Type Ia supernovae field. Many questions remain open about which of the current models agrees best with observations and which parameter values are consistent with observations. The INCITE validation program is expected to lead to a deeper understanding of these models and quantification of the uncertainties in the predictions made by them.

The winning visualization was created by Ray Bair (ANL), Anshu Dubey (Flash Center, UofC), Robert Fisher (U Mass-Dartmouth), Jonathan Gallagher (Flash Center, UofC), Randy Hudson (ANL and Flash Center, UofC), Don Lamb (Flash Center, UofC), Dongwook Lee (Flash Center UofC), John Norris (ANL and Flash Center, UofC), Mike Papka (ANL and Flash Center, UofC), Katherine Riley (ANL), and Dean Townsley (U Alabama).
Click here to watch the award-winning visualization videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opP7ttCCC20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NO6FSi1Lu0