University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center

The University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC), based at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), is consortium of nine University of California campuses and three Department of Energy laboratories (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory). The goal of the consortium is to support and facilitate original research and education in computational astrophysics, and to engage in public outreach and education.
The UC-HiPACC consortium sponsors or co-sponsors conferences and workshops and an annual advanced international summer school at a UC campus. It promotes educational outreach to the public, and maintains a website featuring the latest UC news and findings in computational astronomy, a large archive of lecture videos and presentations, and a gallery of supercomputer-generated astrophysics videos and images.
Staff and Organization.
Joel R. Primack, Distinguished Professor of Physics at UCSC, has directed the UC-HiPACC consortium since its inception.
The staff includes Senior Writer Trudy E. Bell, Administrator Sue Grasso, Scientific Visualization Coordinator Alex Bogert, and webmaster Steve Zaslaw.
The consortium is organized at UCSC under the aegis of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP).
Principal Activities.
The UC-HiPACC consortium, which began operating in January 2010, supports activities to facilitate and encourage excellence, collaboration, and education in astronomy across the University of California system and affiliated DOE National Laboratories. It does not directly fund research or major hardware. Instead, UC-HiPACC sponsors working groups of UC scientists from multiple campuses and labs pursuing joint projects in computational astrophysics; workshops and conferences on topics in computational astrophysics; and an annual advanced summer school on a topic in computational astrophysics. Work done by the staff helps bring the fruits of computational astrophysics research back to the public.
UC-HiPACC Meetings and Summer Schools 2010 – 2013.
Fourteen multiday meetings and International Summer Schools on AstroComputing (ISSAC) were held from 2010 to 2013.
Workshops and Conferences on Computational Astrophysics.
To further its mission in astronomy and education across the UC system, and to enable researchers in the field of AstroComputing to share and further their research through cross fertilization and collaboration, UC-HiPACC sponsors conferences on topics in computational astrophysics.
Future of AstroComputing Workshop (2010).
In December 2010 UC-HiPACC organized a major conference on the Future of AstroComputing at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego (SDSC). UC-HiPACC provided partial support for the Enzo workshop at UCSD in spring 2010.
2012 Science Journalism Boot Camp in Computational Astronomy.
In June 2012, science and engineering journalists — whose publications and productions are estimated to collectively reach more than 10 million readers and viewers worldwide — attended the first journalism “boot camp” on computational astronomy.
Called “Computational Astronomy: From Planets to Cosmos,” the workshop was an intense three-and-a-half-day backgrounder for practicing science or engineering journalists from all media — print, online, broadcast, social media, and film — whether on staff or freelance.
Santa Cruz Galaxy Workshops.
Five-day workshops for galaxy researchers worldwide co-sponsored by UC-HiPACC were held at UCSC in August in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.
The most recent, in August 2013, was attended by nearly 90 participants from about 30 institutions in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Korea, Spain, and the United States. Approximately 50 sessions were held over five days. About 85 presenters from around the world conducted sessions on a variety of current concerns in astrophysics.
Annual Summer School in Computational Astrophysics.
UC-HiPACC supports an annual international advanced school aimed at graduate students and postdocs who are currently working in or actively interested in doing research in AstroComputing. Topics and locations of the annual school rotate among the UC campuses and national laboratories, and Caltech and Stanford also participate. Lectures from summer school sessions are posted on the UC-HiPACC website so that they can be useful worldwide. During these schools, students are afforded direct access to some of the largest supercomputers in the world for running their own simulations.
2010 Summer School.
The first UC-HiPACC summer school was held in July 2010 on the campus of UC Santa Cruz where students learned about the main software models currently used in high resolution simulations of galaxy formation and evolution. In labs, students worked on projects using these codes, supervised by the lecturers. The summer school was directed by Anatoly Klypin, New Mexico State University.
2011 Summer School.
In 2011, 28 grad students — 17 from outside California — gathered at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to learn about Explosive Astrophysics. The focus was on computational explosive astrophysics, including the modeling of core collapse and thermonuclear supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, neutron star mergers, and other energetic transients. Workshops guided students in running and visualizing simulations on supercomputers using codes such as FLASH, CASTRO, GR1D and modules for nuclear burning and radiation transport. The conference was organized by Daniel Kasen and Peter Nugent of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.
2012 Summer School.
Taught from July 9 to 20, 2012, the summer school on the campus of UC San Diego, under the direction of Alex Szaley, hosted by SDSC Director Michael Norman, taught the next generation of researchers how to deal effectively with the avalanche of data that comes from current astronomical observations. The field of study is called "AstroInformatics." Students were afforded access to the San Diego Supercomputer Center for computational and infrastructure support. Conducted over 10 days, 30 hours of lectures, combined with five hours of post-lecture discussions, and 20 hours of hands-on computation labs.
2013 Summer School.
The 2013 AstroComputing Summer School trained future researchers in the use of large-scale simulations in star and planet formation problems. The school covered many of the major public codes in use today, including tutorials and hands-on experience running and analyzing simulations. Student were led by instructors in labs on the new 3,000-core Hyades supercomputer on the UCSC campus.
Cosmological Simulations.
Large cosmological simulations are now the basis for much current research on the structure of the universe and the evolution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. “Numerical simulations have become ... one of the most effective tools
to study and to solve astrophysical problems.” Researchers associated with UC-HiPACC are deeply involved in the two projects described below, which are relevant to UC-HiPACC's mission to promote UC computational astrophysics. The HiPACC website is hosting the Bolshoi website. The UCSC AstroComputing system Hyades, including the Huawei 1 PetaByte AstroData system, will be hosting many of Bolshoi simulation outputs.
Project AGORA.
In 2012, the center launched a galaxy supercomputer simulation project called AGORA (Assembling Galaxies of Resolved Anatomy).
Bolshoi Simulation.
The Bolshoi Cosmological Simulation (q.v.) is the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe made to date.
Education of Public and Other Outreach.
As UC-HiPACC states on its website, “A crucial goal of UC-HiPACC outreach is to give the fruits of UC computational astrophysics research back to the taxpaying public through formal (classroom) and informal (extracurricular) education.”
Activities include the preparation by UC-HiPACC staff of articles to help astronomers reach classroom students and teachers and collaboration with planetaria, science museums, and other organizations that reach the astronomy-interested general public. Planetarium shows for which UC-HiPACC members have contributed astronomical computations and images include “Life: A Cosmic Story” in the 75-foot dome of the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, and “Deep Space Adventure” in the 71-foot 8000 pixel-across dome of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
The UC-HiPACC staff creates and posts to its website approximately monthly “AstroShorts”—illustrated capsule stories about especially interesting work in computational astronomy around the UC-HiPACC consortium, designed for use in the newsletters of astronomical societies, science clubs, newspapers, or other outlets. The website's “Press Room” publishes press releases on computational astronomy from around the UC-HiPACC consortium.
A visualization from the Bolshoi Cosmological Simulation, the most detailed cosmological simulation run to date, was narrated in the National Geographic TV special "Inside the Milky Way".
UC-HiPACC provided footage from the Bolshoi Simulation to the Icelandic performer Björk for her musical number “Dark Matter” for her Biophilia concert.
The organization conducts outreach to raise funds to support the activities described in this article.