My thesis research has concerned the role of neutrino transport in the explosion mechanism of core collaspe supernovae. I have helped develop a spherically symmetric radiation hydrodynamics code, AGILE-BOLTZTRAN, to study this problem. The code couples a state-of-the-art adaptive hydro code to a S_N radiation transport code for neutrinos. We have recently shown supernova simulations can succeed in spherical symmetry if Boltzmann neutrino transport is implemented (Mezzacappa et al, 2000).

My immediate future plans center on porting AGILE-BOLTZTRAN to MPP machines. The code is currently in production on the NERSC PVP cluster. The radiation transport (and, indeed, on a smaller scale, the implicit hydrodynamics) in AGILE-BOLTZTRAN require the solution of a large (~15,000 x 15,000), sparse, non-symmetric linear system at each time step. The efficient solution of such system is a subject of great interest in computational science. I plan to evaluate several packages in the ACTS toolkit (e.g. AZTEC, PETSC) as the first step in this program. Future code development will require more and more computational efficieny, as we start to do Boltzmann radiation transport in multidimensions.
References:

Mezzacappa, A., Liebendoerfer, M., Messer, O.E.B., Hix, W. R., Thielemann, F.-K., & Bruenn, S. W. 2000. The Simulation of a Spherically Symmetric Supernova of a 13 Solar Mass Star with Boltzmann Neutrino Transport, and Its Implications for the Supernova Mechanism. Accepted, Phy. Rev. Lett.

Mezzacappa, A. & Messer, O.E.B. 1999. Neutrino transport in core collapse supernovae. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 109, 281--319.(Invited contribution to a volume dedicated to computational astrophysics.)