B1 – Commission B1 Computational Astrophysics

Description

The commission B1 "Computational Astrophysics" stimulates and coordinates community effort on improving our understanding of astrophysical phenomena by means of computing.

Computational astrophysics is not just a specialization of computational physics, but it opens new windows in the way we perceive and study the heavens. This rapidly growing (relatively) new discipline in astronomy combines modern computational methods, novel hardware design, advanced algorithms, original software implementations and associated technologies to discover new phenomena, and to make predictions in astronomy. Computational astrophysics touches on many topics in astronomy, including data mining, artificial intelligence, numerical analysis, solving differential equations, algorithm- and hardware design, etc.

The objective for commission B1 is to combine efforts of scientists solving computationally demanding problems (gas dynamics, MHD, radiation transfer, N-body, data processing, etc.) in order to share approaches, ideas and methods; to assess the current level, requirements, bottle-necks and future prospects of numerical simulations; to ensure the needed level of synergy between various models; to probe the potential of citizen science and distributed computations; to organize conferences, workshops, computational astrophysics schools etc.

Over the coming years Commission B1 will focus on supporting the following particularly important activities:

Stimulate and enable access to world-class high-performance computing facilities.
Homogenize and increase the availability of numerical software by means of open source.
Support the handling of large and complex data archives, such as the Gaia data archive, LSST and LOFAR, etc.
Inspire education in the use of supercomputers, parallel and distributed algorithms, and numerical modeling.